Fourth Estate

Steven Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken is the latest in his trilogy – with The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), The Gift of Speed (2004) – about a northern suburb of Melbourne. Referred to only as ‘the suburb’, this anonymity serves to make it a universal place on the fringes of any Australian city ...

If the role of myth is to elaborate an unbearable truth so frequently and variously that its burden is made bearable, it is no wonder that the story of Orpheus and Eurydice exists in a multitude of retellings and a plethora of different versions on canvas, screen, stage and disc. Most of these remain faithful to its romantic-tragic paradigm: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy does not get her back. Consumers of this myth of inexhaustible mystery willingly relive, time and time again, the magnetic pull of fathomless love and the black hole of inconsolable loss. 

While Australian women in particular have been avid diarists and letter-writers, the activity du jour is overwhelmingly the writing of memoir, inspired by the notion that everyone’s life is memorable and worth recording. Some memoirists are searching for the truth of their lives, to recover the past or perhaps recover from it. Some are simply recording their story for family consumption. Others, the more ambitious, are seeking publication and fame. Carmel Bird’s advice to them – ‘Stay young. Stay Beautiful. And maybe climb Everest with your eyes shut’ – is the only pessimistic comment in this whole book.

Britain’s Prospect magazine recently canvassed a number of leading thinkers on the question of what, in coming decades, would replace the great twentieth-century schism between left and right. In an overwhelmingly pessimistic field, the contribution of Pakistani scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy stood out in its cold-blooded concision. ‘Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian,’ he predicted. ‘In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe.’

Grassdogs’ literary antecedents jostle like faces crowding around a porthole on a departing emigrant ship. One can tick them off like books on a required reading list for a twentieth-century Australian literature course. The doppelganger Jekyll-and-Hyde protagonists (blithe young city lawyer Tony Tindale and his bestial, increasingly wretched uncle Edgar) might have been written with actor Dan Wyllie in mind. Edgar even loses teeth in a car accident, just like Wyllie.

Foreign travellers in India face four inevitable questions. ‘What is your good name?’ is usually followed in rapid succession by ‘Where are you coming from?’(meaning from which country), ‘Are you married?’ and, finally, ‘What is your religion?’. Backpacking through India twenty years ago, the first three questions presented few problems. My name was easy, Australia was recognised as a cricket-playing country, and I was young enough for my lack of a wife to be passed over as a matter of only mild embarrassment. The fourth question however, proved tricky. Usually, I gave the technically correct answer that I had been baptised into the Anglican Church – a reply that generally satisfied my interlocutors and not infrequently led into rambling, good-natured discussions about the similarities between the world’s great faiths. Once, I ventured a more honest response. ‘I am an atheist,’ I told a couple of friendly young Indian men on a long train journey. ‘I do not believe in any God.’ Their shock was palpable. It was not so much my spiritual deficit that appalled them as my arrogance. How could anyone have the audacity to declare that God did not exist? Our conversation never recovered. In response to all future interrogations, I retreated to my dissembling line about Christianity. The experience did not shake my disbelief, but it did serve to engender a greater respect for the question. Religion, I belatedly realised, is an important matter.

There is every reason to admire this novel’s intent, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t recommend the result. Linda Jaivin’s current affairs comedy about the Villawood Detention Centre is so conscious of its pedagogic goals that it fails to offer a decent story. And it’s not funny. Believe me, I wanted to like it. Jaivin is a terrific writer with an enviable range, capable of the witty, surrealist smut of Eat Me (1995) and the kind of nuanced cross-cultural analysis that underpinned The Monkey and the Dragon (2001), her undervalued biography of Chinese rock’n’roll dissident Hou Dejian.

A friend called me from Beijing recently to ask advice about her novel. She had played a prominent part in the avant-garde art movement associated with the protests at Tiananmen in 1989, and had achieved notoriety in both art and life. Fifteen years on, she wanted to give her own account of events, choosing the form of a roman-à-clef that would be published first in English. But now the Hong Kong agent helping to prepare her text wanted changes to enhance its appeal to foreign publishers. The agent wanted to tart it up, and my friend was unhappy.

Carmel Bird stakes a great deal on her prose style. The delicate latticework of imagery, the fascination with detail and colour, the allusions, the linguistic gamesmanship, the florid descriptive passages (and Bird’s writing is literally florid: there are flowering plants everywhere) – these are at least as important to her fiction as narrative. Her writing does not just revel in the sensuality of language; at times, this sensuality shapes the form. In her long story ‘Woodpecker Point’, for example, the action is veiled in lush rhetoric. The intention is to tease out small correspondences and to develop an intricate verbal pattern. So, while the narrative is disjointed, the finely woven imagery is rolled out like one long strip of carpet. This is often true of Bird’s short stories. They frequently centre on strange or sinister happenings, around which grows a delicate bubble of linguistic indulgence.

Kate Llewellyn has written sixteen books, which is quite an achievement. They include poetry, fiction and autobiography. One book, The Waterlily (1987), has sold 30,000 copies, a notable accomplishment for any author. The Waterlily was the first book in Llewellyn’s Blue Mountains trilogy; the second was called Dear You (1988). I read it years ago, having borrowed it from a library because I suspected the title might be an indication of the tone. It was not the epistolary format that gave me pause: I have relished many correspondences, ranging from the passionate exchanges of Julie and St Preux in Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) to Robert Dessaix’s grapplings with life-threatening illness in his acclaimed Night Letters (1996). But for my taste, the series of missives beginning ‘Dear You’ betrayed an irritating archness. The author seemed to be caught between the heady excitement of Revealing All and a coy fear of saying Too Much.