Revising the Past

Now imagine this. (Highly hypothetical situation for all my blog readers I think!) You are a critically acclaimed author with several successful books under your belt. Your work is just going from strength to strength. The trouble is that when you look back at your earliest published work, it now seems ... somehow lacking. You've learned so much along the way. You've grown as a person, and as a writer, and looking back now you can see the flaws in your earlier work.

Do you get tempted to go back and revise?

A couple of recent articles in The Age raise this very question. First of all, Jane Sullivan wrote that Peter Carey set the cat among the pigeons by saying on a TV bookshow that he intends to go back and line edit his early stories. His fellow authors on the show, Paul Auster and Ian McEwan were apparently shocked :

It was almost as if Carey had uttered a heresy. Yet, what he was proposing didn't seem so awful. He explained that the idea had come to him when he was preparing a reading in New York a few years ago. He was going to read the story he was most proud of, American Dreams. But when he began to look at the sentences, he thought they were "really appalling". He could not bear to read them aloud in the company of other writers such as Joyce Carol Oates*, so he sat down and line-edited the story.

And presumably just didn't want to stop at just that one!

Now it seems that this year's Miles Franklin winner Steven Carroll is revisiting his earlier fiction starting with his 1994 novel, Momoko, which was republished last year as The Lovers' Room. Later this month Twilight in Venice is due to be launched - this is a rewriting of his 1998 novel, The Lovesong of Lucy McBride.

Carroll explains :

With Momoko I underwrote the book and I knew I did. I rushed it ... With Lucy McBride I was determined not to underwrite the book and I overwrote it. I knocked out about 50,000 words, I threw out about five or six characters and it all concentrates on three characters and Twilight is a much shorter book. It's only about 55,000 words. I wrote a lot of new material too. ... If you can, if you've still got enthusiasm, what's the harm with going back and making something work a little bit better than it did initially. ... the earlier ones were apprenticeship books, I was still learning my trade.

There's another intriguing antipodean example of an author rewriting the novels of his youth. The other day I mentioned New Zealand's Witi Ihimaera, as a novelist deserving much wider attention. He decided to revise works that had for decades been considered classics of New Zealand literature.

The reason?

I was a colonised person when I wrote those books. It’s been a whole process of personal decolonisation that I’ve had to go through to do this. Part of that decolonisation is to get out of my family. Trying to create for myself a sense of independence; a sense of political independence and a sense of sovereignty that allows me to see with my own eyes and with my own judgment the sorts of things my grandmothers were trying to tell me. ‘What you see is not what it’s all about.’ ... I was born brown with a white soul. Over the years I’ve had to find that brown soul again. And thank God, I’ve done it.

Comparing the before and after versions of the revised works of course will, as Sullivan points out, give PhD students a great deal of fun!

So are such revisions, understandable and even desirable? Or do you agree with Joyce Carol Oates :

... that is folly for the vindictive elder to try to set right the product of youth with the doubtful wisdom of experience.

Good News from the Suburbs

Steven Caroll takes this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious prize, with his novel The Time We Have Taken which the judges called :

... a moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.

Carroll who is also a playwright and theatre critic has been nominated for the award twice before - in 2002 for The Art of the Engine Driver (which also won France's Prix Femina for Best Foreign Novel) and in 2005 for The Gift of Speed. The winning novel, which also won the 2008 Commonwealth Prize for the Asia-Pacific region, forms the third part of a trilogy.

Carroll says that he draws his inspiration form the suburbs. On radio show AM he said :

This book, and the three books that constitute the trilogy, are all set in a rectangle of land that is around about a mile and a half long and a half mile wide, out there on the suburban frontier, and right from the start I found in that rectangle of land, not just satire, not just stereotype, and not just TV sitcom, but I found the stuff of literary fiction. ... I've got letters from people from the first two books and they say, what a relief it is to read a book that actually treats the suburbs with a bit of respect and treats the characters from the suburbs with respect. Not as just sort of, you know, stock comic buffoons.

You can read extracts from the novel on the Harper Collins website, and there's more about Carroll's win at The Australian.

Meanwhile, Geraldine Brooks has won Australian Book Industry's Book of the Year Award for People of the Book, described on Brook's website as :

... an intricate, ambitious novel that traces the journey of a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript from convivencia Spain to the ruins of Sarajevo, from the Silver Age of Venice to the sunburned rock faces of northern Australia.

Inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, People of the Book is a sweeping adventure through five centuries of history. From its creation in Muslim-ruled, medieval Spain, the illuminated manuscript makes a series of perilous journeys: through Inquisition-era Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the Nazi sacking of Sarajevo.