Viking

This quote from Buddha opens Tasting Salt, Dowrick’s second novel, and freedom is its main theme. But the freedom in question is of the quiet domestic kind rather than the revolutionary clenched-fist-and-anthem kind. Cordelia, preparing a cocktail party for her seventy-third birthday, suddenly finds herself a widow after fifty years of marriage to George. George’s departure precipitates a crisis of self. No longer able to define herself simply as ‘George’s wife’ or even ‘George’s widow’ she finds herself confronted by the past and unresolved questions of identity, sexuality, and gender. Cordelia’s odyssey, frequently confusing and sometimes painful ultimately brings her a modicum of joy and renewed faith.

David Marr, in his biography of Patrick White, makes the statement that White saw suffering as a force of history shaping human life and events. The worst suffering of all being loneliness and the need to be rescued from it. White is quoted as saying; ‘I have always found in my own case that something positive, either creative or moral, has come out of anything I have experienced in the way of affliction.’ Marr explains that White admired, in others, signs of his own ambivalence: ‘men of unexpected gentleness and women with masculine strength’. A realisation, an explanation, sensed in childhood and expressed when he was an old man. Perhaps the inheritance for many sensitive and perceptive children.

It takes a book like Robin Klein’s The Listmaker to remind adults that a children’s book which succeeds in conveying a child’s point of view may well not immediately engage more mature readers. In this instance, Klein so precisely articulates the self-absorbed voice of twelve­year-old Sarah, the eponymous listmaker, that it takes an effort of will for an adult reader to persist past the first few pages of what seem like overstated emotions and overdetermined plot. Children will have no trouble accepting Sarah’s voice and understanding that it’s like it is because it’s been distorted by her circumstances. Adults too, however, would do well to persevere with The Listmaker, for it turns out to be a heart-felt indictment of how our greedy me-first society can damage children.

Intimacy, someone has said, is ultimately unintelligible. Yet this novel suggests that intimacy, to the self and to others, may well be all we have. Miller’s three previous novels move in a similar direction. But in them there was a good deal still of the world of the likeness, of the external world as it seems to be. The Sitters, however, is about drawing a portrait of an ‘art of misrepresentation’, which interrupts our historical consciousness and unmasks the pretentions of rationality, taking us out into the dark beyond common sense, touching something else beyond words.

It’s a clever and provocative title that Patsy Adam-Smith has chosen for her autobiography. She is a woman who has said many ‘goodbyes’ in her rich and adventurous life; and she is of an age and disposition where ‘girlie’ is heard as an endearment, not a put-down. Patsy Adam­Smith is one of Australia’s greatest writers, although you will rarely hear the literati or the academics say so in public. As an historian she has been more widely read than Manning Clark (it would be interesting to know how many of the purchasers of Clark have been able to finish each volume); and she and Wendy Lowenstein have listened to the histories of more Australians than probably the rest of us put together. But she remains insignificant in the eyes of the theorists of oral memory and historical consciousness.

When most of literary publishing is in the doldrums, literary biographies are seen to be the one bright line in the publisher’s balance sheet. Such is the enthusiasm for biographies that a bevy of scribblers are at this moment casting about for a writer who hasn’t already been ‘done’. I find something unset­tling about this voyeuristic fascination where the life of a writer has come to possess an inherent interest, quite apart from the work for which the writer became famous. On this, if not much else, I agree with the caustic Gore Vidal:

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.

I discovered Ruth Park’s Companion Guide to Sydney in a Sydney second-hand bookshop in 1980. Published in 1973, it was already out of print, probably because it evokes a Sydney that no longer existed. In the early 1970s, Park writes, ‘Sydney was beginning to pull itself to pieces, the air was full of fearful noise, the sky of dust … And the terrible sound of the rock pick tirelessly pecking away at Sydney’s sandstone foundations was over all.’

The word history means many different things to different people. But generally speaking it entails an attempt by an author to explain, or make sense of, the past. That is, the historian gathers together the material, the evidence as it were, and from that draws a number of conclusions which we as readers are expected to believe. Prisoners of War, by Patsy Adam-Smith, encompassing three wars, from Gallipoli to Korea, is not that kind of history.