The feeling is there is a very clear line of demarcation between the two things. With crime, romance, science fiction, we are considered to be writers within a formulaic genre, whereas literary writers are considered to be 'moving freely', as it were. ... There has always been a feeling that literary fiction is improving, that you come away from reading it and you're a better person for it. No one ever said that about reading a crime novel – although maybe you come away feeling happier.
... a story about murder, deceit, police corruption and politics set amid the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria.
Could Britain's top literary prize, the Man Booker prize ever go to a crime novel? asks Alison Flood in The Guardian. She talks, among others to critic John Sutherland (who feels it is unlikely) and crime novelist Ian Rankin (who feels that attitudes to crime fiction are changing.)
Temple says in the article that writing crime was just :
... an excuse to write. ... It gives a sense of urgency, of narrative drive. My characters have a reason to get up in the morning. Ian McEwan, who I think is wonderful, his characters do not really have an urgent reason to get up in the morning ...
And he feels that:
There is only one judgment for the value of a book, and that is what sort of emotional response it elicits in the reader. That's down to the quality of the writing.
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens when Temple's novel is submitted for the Booker this year!
The notebooks excited me because, for all their gaps and mysteries, they recorded, verbatim, conversations around which I could build a story. I’d have to invent the context for the conversations, and I’d have to speculate about the people who spoke the words, and I was uncertain about how appropriate it was to do that. But in the end I felt it was important to try, because this story was one that recorded an aspect of our past—shared between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians—that was hugely important. It records a moment in that shared history where mutual goodwill and generous curiosity created real understanding.
Australian novelist, Kate Grenville (shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize for The Secret River), writes about how the contents of two notebooks brought alive to the friendship between a young lieutenant in a newly formed penal colony at the end of the C18th, and a young aboriginal girl; and how she set about using and this material and fleshing it out with further research. She says:
As a novelist I have latitude to speculate, to add, to omit, to guess and even to invent. But I also have available to me all the richness of the historical record. In a tradition that goes back to Homer and beyond, I’ve taken events that took place in the real world and used them as the basis for a work of imagination.
There are so many more excellent articles for the various editions of Quill magazine posted up on Eric Forbes' blog, so I urge you to go have a read. Quill seems to have evolved over the past couple of years into one of the best literary magazines - anywhere!
Dear sir or madam,My name is Sonya Hartnett, I am fifteen years old. I have written a story about a young adolescent boy and the problems he has with his family, friends and society in general. Many of my friends say that I should get it published. Could you please tell me what I am required to do if I send it to you?
Jane Sullivan attend an exhibition about books and writing in Victoria and finds, among other fascinating literary memorabilia (including Peter Carey's laptop and Tony Wheeler's first travel diary) the above letter written by a young hopeful to a publisher. What is remarkable is the tact and generosity with which the feedback is handled by Frank Thompson, then a general manager at Rigby, who reminds Harnett :
Writing is a bit like playing sport ... Everyone can play most games but only a few play games so well that we will pay to watch them play, and even they have to practise continually ...
She took Thompson's advice to rewrite and her first novel, Trouble All the Way, was published a short time later, to be followed by many others. (And of course, she is listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize this year.)
Ah, the importance of encouraging emerging writers ... and helping them grow.
Another exhibition with an literary link features furniture made specifically for favourite authors! Genevieve Roberts in The Independent reports that fifty of the world's best-known designers (including Christian Lacroix and Paul Smith) have been invited to create a piece for the writer who has most influenced their lives. Esther Henwood's book from the exhibitions Design et Littérature: Une Liaison Inspiré is to be published in Paris this week.
Some examples of the works :
The architect and designer Claudio Colucci conceived a lounge sofa made from carbon fibre for the James Bond writer Ian Fleming. "I have always liked the fantasy element in design," he said. "Too much function bores me. I thought of creating an amphibious car, but that already exists, so I designed a lounge-sofa for drinking champagne, for two, of course."The fashion designer Christian Lacroix imagined a mid-20th Century wrought-iron chair for the French novelist, Patrick Modiano. Lacroix said: "I like his form of melancholy; like him, I'm nostalgic."... The architect India Mahdavi designed a cat-shaped sofa in homage to Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Mahdavi, who chose a cat because the animal appears throughout Murakami's work, said that when she was introduced to the novelist, "it was like entering someone's dream, in a universe where fantasy and reality are mixed".
Other works :
... have been imagined for great literary figures, such as Proust, Tolstoy and Flaubert. Others were conceived for contemporary writers who will have the chance to see the designs that have been imagined.
I got very frustrated yesterday trying to find some pictures of the pieces online, but I hope that they will appear in the days and weeks to come, and if they do, will post them.
But this news does rather beg the question - what piece of furniture would you design for your favourite author?
In almost all writing, you've got to trust that what's getting said gets said before you know what you've said. It's not about knowing what you want to say and then getting it said.
David Malouf, arguably Australia's greatest living writer, turned 75 a couple of days back. He shares his thoughts about writing with Miriam Cosic in The Australian. I particularly liked this :
I want books to unfold as if they were dreams and even to have the logic of dreams ... I deliberately don't plan where the writing is going so that things can happen with the same unpredictability, with the same process of association rather than logical unfolding. That provides something for the reader as well: the reader has something like the same sense of discovery that the writer does. As a writer, discipline for me is to learn more and more how to fall quickly into that state.
... the story of young boy's rite of passage as he enters into the bustling, cosmopolitan street life of the contemporary Chinese cities of Dalian and Shanghai, under the tutelage of his uncle, a professional pickpocket.
Mo was born in Singapore, but grew up in Taiwan, China, Canada, the US and New Zealand. he worked as a software developer in New York, and later as an English teacher in north-east China, before returning to New Zealand. He lives in Aukland.
... begins with a four-year-old child being slapped at a barbecue in Melbourne's northern suburbs by someone who is not a family member. The uproar that follows is seen from the points of view of eight distinctly drawn characters and puts family loyalty, friendships and social ethics into a fierce crucible.
...lyrical, meticulously crafted prose, with the moving and memorable treatment of the diasporic experience coupled with her significant achievement in extending the form of the short story
... a darkly comic tour de force which takes as its starting point the plane crash which killed Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq. Praised for its "amazingly detailed and plausible portrayal of historical events", as well as its "great political insight and stylistic virtuosity" ...
This is the first time a Pakistani has been a regional winner.
The overall winners of the Commonwealth Writers Prize will be announced in mid-May.
Some fantastic news! Harry was granted a Royal Pardon by his Majesty the King of Thailand on Wednesday afternoon Bangkok time. The Nicolaides family is grateful to his Majesty the King for the decision he has made and to the relevant Thai authorities who dealt with the pardon application in an expeditious manner. Harry has been released from prison and has arrived back in Melbourne today. For a short time, Harry will not be speaking to any media as he will be initially focusing on regaining his health and rejoining with his family in Melbourne.
The last 6 months has been an extremely difficult and trying time for my family and our mission is now accomplished – we brought Harry home. I would sincerely like to thank everyone who has supported the family’s efforts and in assisting with encouraging the Australian government to take affirmative action to secure Harry’s release.
Yes but ... was Nicholaides deliberately courting danger? A former colleague says he remembers the author talking about ways to achieve literary fame and rejecting advice not to publish the section that gave offense. :
In the end, Nicolaides was simply a literary speculator whose quest for fame and notoriety cost him dearly.
Harry Nicolaides, the Australian author who has been imprisoned in a Thai jail talks to Andrew Marshall.about his conditions in prison [via Facebook] :
We’re woken at 6 and counted in the cell. Mine is 40ft long and 15ft wide, holding 50 or 60 prisoners, mostly Thais, mostly murderers and rapists. The cell has one toilet, which is a hole in the ground, and poor ventilation. I sleep in a face mask because tuberculosis and pneumonia are common. I’ve been in this jail for five months now since my arrest last September.
My book, Verisimilitude, was a rather clumsy first attempt at fiction — only 50 copies were printed, and seven sold. I love Thailand and respect the royal family. It was never my intention to offend anyone. I didn’t think what I wrote constituted lese-majesty. I’m an Australian who came to Thailand five years ago, and the passage in my book [alluding to the “romantic entanglements and intrigues” of the Thai monarchy] is no different from things I’ve heard Thai people say over and over again with impunity.
For breakfast I have a small carton of soya milk and a biscuit. Then the prisoners wash and shave around large troughs covered in mould and grime. The water’s changed once a week. Then there’s assembly. We stand to attention as the Thai flag is raised.
We’re asked to sit and pray to a large gold Buddha. I use the time to collect my thoughts and think about my loved ones. Then the guards subject us to long speeches in Thai. I imagine they’re about prison etiquette.
I’m taken upstairs with other foreigners to clean another cell block. Then we’re at leisure for a while. I used to walk around, but I can’t help but encounter the weak and the feeble — like men with TB, languishing on benches. It deadens me. So I try to spend my time replying to the many letters I receive. Letters keep me alive.
We are allowed one 30-minute visit a day, but not on weekends or holidays. The hardest part is walking back to my cell after a visit from family or friends. I break down when I think how they’re suffering.
At 12 the lunch bell rings. The food’s mostly fish bones in hot water, extremely spicy, with rice. I’ve tried it and felt unwell. I can’t afford to fall sick — the mental strain is enough — so my family send me some chicken and a salad every day. It arrives at about 2. There are 20 or 25 cats, who run into the mess hall before the prisoners. Some men put cigarettes in the cats’ mouths or do other unspeakable things to them. For others the cats are a source of comfort in a place full of bitter, twisted people and feelings.
I’m barefoot 80% of my day. It’s partly a security measure so we can’t leap over the electrified, barbed-wire fence, and partly Thai custom. But the floors are covered with fish bones, saliva and cat vomit, so the soles of my feet are black.
I am led to court in shackles and chains. It’s positively medieval. They’re degrading and they bruise and lacerate the ankles. They make you feel you’re guilty.
They say that it’s easy to get to someone in a prison like this, so I’m always on the alert. I’ve met some colourful characters, like Viktor Bout, the suspected Russian arms dealer. He’s an unassuming, softly spoken man. He gave me some garlic the other day — and a manuscript of his life story to edit.
I haven’t looked at it yet. Lots of people give me manuscripts about their lives and cases. They’ve misunderstood that I’m a BBC journalist, of all things.
At 4pm we’re locked in the cells until 6am. That’s a very long time. My patch is about a foot wide, the length of my body. I cannot move to the left or right without pressing on another person. I cannot stretch out my legs without kicking someone.
On the king’s 81st birthday I saw fireworks in the distance. Some Thai prisoners had tears in their eyes, praising a man they regard not just as their king but their father. I may not be a subject of Thailand, but I am a son, and I know what it means to love a father. I’m applying for a royal pardon. I pray the king learns of my plight so I might enjoy his grace, as all his subjects do.
We must make our own provision for dinner. When I’ve finished my chicken, Thais beg for my scraps. The fluorescent lights stay on at night, so I sleep with a cardboard box over my head. I toss and turn on a thin mat on the hard floor. “And this too shall pass,” other foreigners tell me. It’s an old adage and true. But time passes very slowly here.
A blog for the campaign to bring Harry home can be found here with links to the petition.
Nicholaides self-published a novel called Verisimilitude four years ago which sold a total of 7 copies. (The only copy which is still known to exist apparently sits on the shelf of the Thai National Library, freely available to the public!) The book contained a short passage, just 103 words long, which describes the rather flamboyant private life of an unnamed Thai prince.
(I dug around and found the actual extract here if your curiosity is getting the better of you!)
Nicolaides admitted the charge of insulting the royal family, but said he was unaware he was committing an offence.
But PEN American Centre has launched a protest and lists addresses where appeals can be sent.
I join with them in :
• Expressing serious concern about the detention and charge against writer Harry Nicolaides;
• Calling for his immediate and unconditional release in accordance with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Thailand is a signatory.
This is a much overdue post (sorry!) on the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Prize which was won by David Malouf (left) for his collection The Complete Stories. It is really nice to see the short story in good health after dire prognostications were made of its demise, and this sounds a fine book.
There's a massive change coming up and Asia will be the world's hot spot. The bulk of the world's consumers are here in the Asia-Pacific, and they're going to need books set here. Asia on its own can't climb on to the world contemporary literature stage easily and neither can Australia. Put the two together, and they're unbeatable. People are not recognising this. But this award does, so I do hope they continue it. ... You've got this fabulous market right here: there are four billion Asians, they're all obsessed by education and almost all of them studying English. So what do they do? They go out and buy English books.
Let's hope more Asian voices will find their way onto the longlist in future years ... including, if it isn't tempting fate to wish this, some of our own.
There's a hunger out there ... People don't feel satisfied in their day jobs, they feel spiritually impoverished and they want to do something creative. Not everybody wants to publish a book but they want to make a change in their lives, make a break with the past.
Lecturer Antoni Jach talks to Jane Sullivan in the Ageabout the huge increase in the number of creative writing courses in Australia and the number of students taking them. The TAFE courses have been particularly successful and Jach reckons its students have produced about 100 published books. The impressive list of alumni includes Miles Franklin winner Alexis Wright.
If you picked up the free copy of MPH's Quill magazine, you will have read my interview with Janet de Neefe, who founded the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival. Janet and her husband Ketut Suardana run two of Bali's most famous restaurants, Casa Luna of Ubud and Indus of Campuan, (website here) as well as Honeymoon Guesthouse where regular cookery classes are held. Janet is also the author of Fragrant Rice: My Continuing Love Affair with Bali published by Harper Collins Australia.
Sadly, there was one question that had to be cut due to space constraints, and since I asked it for you, I append it here because this dish is absolutely yummy!:
Could you give us a typical Balinese recipe that our Malaysian readers might enjoy?
KARE AYAM
Chicken curry
Probably the most wonderful aspect of making a curry is the heavenly aromas that drift through the house when food is being prepared. Balinese chicken curry is lighter than its Indian counterpart. You can also replace the chicken with any other meat, fish or vegetable.
For maximum flavour, I always use chicken thigh or leg with the bone for a curry. However, you can use chicken breast or boned meat if you prefer. Use fresh galangal and turmeric for this dish as the flavour, aroma and texture will be far superior to the powdered varieties.
Serves 3-4
750 g chicken pieces
1-2 cups coconut milk
5 tbs oil for frying
1 lemongrass
3 salam leaves (These are a kind of Indonesian bay leaves)
4 lime leaves
sea salt
2 tsp tamarind
Spices:
5 small red shallots
7 small cloves garlic
3 large red chilli
2-3 bird's-eye chillies
1 tbs ginger
3 tbs galangal
3 candlenut
1 tbs fresh turmeric
½ tomato 2 stalks of lemongrass
1/4 tsp shrimp paste
2 tsp coriander seeds
1/4 tsp cumin (opt)
1 tbs palm sugar
Blend all the spices in the container of a food processor until paste-like. Add a little water if necessary. Bruise the extra lemon grass and tie into a loose knot.
Heat the oil in a wok over a medium flame. Throw in the spices, lemongrass, lime leaves and salam leaves. Push them back and forth confidently for 30 seconds until fragrant and shiny, making sure they don’t burn on the base of the wok. Add the chicken and toss around until sealed or half-cooked. This will take at least two minutes. Add two cups of water and boil for about fifteen minutes or until the meat is cooked. Now add the final layer of coconut milk.
Bring to the boil, simmer for a minute and then turn off.
Check seasonings and serve topped with shallots. Add sea salt to taste.
Alternatives:
Potatoes, beans, or carrots may be added, or tempe/tofu may be used as a meat substitute.
Compared to China, and perhaps elsewhere, Australia is abashed, sceptical and ironic about its writers. Literary prizes tend to raise little public attention: Australia has no equivalent, for example, of the Man Booker carnival, and there's no especial public esteem offered to the lucky recipients of awards. The Miles Franklin Award, arguably the country's most prestigious, raises an eyebrow, but has little hope of competing for cultural attention with the panoptical hyperbole of television or sport.
It seemed, simply by its announcement, to affirm a new commitment to literary culture, to legitimate its importance, and to suggest, almost heretically, that writing was an activity worthy of serious regard and reward.
and why, at the same time, the PM Kevin Rudd should not choose the winner.
Burning In by Mireille Juchau El Dorado by Dorothy Porter Jamaica: A novel by Malcolm Knox Sorry by Gail Jones The Complete Stories by David Malouf The Widow and Her Hero by Tom Keneally The Zookeeper's War by Steven Conte
Non-fiction shortlist
A History of Queensland by Raymond Evans Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799 by Philip Dwyer Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers by Philip Jones Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer Vietnam: The Australian War by Paul Ham
A full synopsis of all the books can be found in pdf's on the award website : fiction here and non-fiction here.
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.
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.
Nobel winner JM Coetzee revealed last week that his colleagues and associates at the University of Cape Town were also also his secret censors during the last days of apartheid.
These teachers and writers might greet their quarry in the university corridors of Cape Town or (in one case) invite him for over for a barbecue: "I was rubbing shoulders daily with people who were secretly deciding whether or not I was going to be published in South Africa."
The irony is clear :
... these shrouded arbiters thought that they were on the author's side. Over and over, they reported that Coetzee's gnomic fiction would only appeal to a minority of "sophisticated", "discriminating" and (above all) "intellectual" readers. So the novels could safely be allowed to circulate – and would pass way over the heads of the vulnerable masses. "These people," Coetzee concluded, "regarded themselves as part of the literary community, and as unsung heroes of a kind." In their refined eyes, they "took on a dirty job in order to safeguard South African literature against the Philistines". Far better that they, with their ideals, should censor than some boorish bureaucrat.
In outlook and action, these stalwart anti-Communists reminded me of no one so much as the arts-loving Stalinist snitches of the old East Germany – as screened so memorably in The Lives of Others. At any cheese-and-wine do, c.1980, these genteel dogsbodies of despotism might have got along famously. As a parable of the self-delusions that permit good – or at least righteous – people to serve malign causes, Coetzee's analysis had all the lapidary power of his stories. For his censors (whom he imagined poring over his suspect prose, Mozart on the stereo, an Irish setter on the rug), the end more than justified the means. And the end was the preservation of a system that would have kept Mandela in jail until the day he died.
... 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.
... 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.
You could look at it one way as this competition, this philanthropic game, if you like ... You can look at it another way where it's parallel to how culture is passed down - you have a mentor, you have an elder, and you have a young person that is being presented with something true and something sacred ...
You can read a n extract from Winch's novel Swallow the Air, here. At the moment the book is not available outside Australia, but I really hope that it soon become available to a wider readership.
I first heard about the Rolex mentorships*
... created to assist extraordinary, rising artists to achieve their full potential.
It's been quite a journey for the young writer of Wiradjuri, Afghan and English descent, who grew up in a housing commission strip in Wollongong, NSW. After her parents split up when she was nine, her mother reared the four children in an environment Winch describes as sometimes fraught but ultimately positive.
Always a reader, she was still at high school when Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken ("Two roads diverged in a wood and I --/ I took the one less travelled by,/ And that has made all the difference") inspired her to become a traveller, too. Travel, geographical and spiritual, has been a passion ever since.
At 17, armed with a two-person tent, a pair of boots and a writing pad, she left Wollongong to hitchhike across Australia. "I just told Mum I was going," she says over orange juice in a London cafe the day after the Rolex launch. "I felt this need to know my country. And because being away forces you to reflect, I started writing as a way of understanding my childhood and my world. Travellers I met gave me books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which helped me to look at things differently. I put everything down on paper."
Wanderlust piqued, the word freedom tattooed on her arm, Winch travelled through India, then spent six months at a Tibetan centre in Scotland, practising the Buddhism that continues to direct her life. Back in Australia three years later, she settled in Brisbane and struggled to make ends meet. In her spare time she hung out at the State Library of Queensland, feeding her appetite for reading. "One day I saw an ad for their short-story writing competition. There was prizemoney, so I typed one up on my old orange portable typewriter."
Her story won the $500 runner-up prize and became the first instalment of Swallow the Air. Winch wrote much of the book while pregnant with her daughter, Lila, now 2 1/2.
(*Congrats, of course also to Malaysian filmaker Ho Yuhang who made it to the finals in the Film category, and while he didn't win, at least got to meet Martin Scorsese!)
Author Garth Nix can now count Erna as one of his fans (after Daphne Lee introduced her to his works, via her reviews of his books in Starmag!)
Erna emailed me to pass on this little tidbit from Publishing News. Usually an author of a best-selling novel waits until Hollywood comes knocking. Not Nix, who has assembled :
.. an A-list dream team in order to bring Sabriel, the first book in his Old Kingdom trilogy, to the screen.
and plans to pitch the project directly to the studios himself. Talk about taking control! Perhaps other authors with some bestselling clout will take a leaf from his book?
In Peter Carey's new novel His Illegal Self, the child, a seven year old called Che (named for revolutionary Che Guevara) is not only a willing party to the abduction, he's actually been waiting for it.
They will come for you, man. they'll break you out of here
his neighbour predicts, referring to the boy's parents, famous student radicals on the run from the FBI.
When Dial arrives one day at the apartment Che shares with his WASP grandmother in New Yorks Upper East Side, he recognises her immediately, and soon the pair are on the run from the law and with financial and, with tactical help from the activists, eventually skip the country and find themselves on the run in Australia. Is the young woman with honey-colored skin, tangled hair in 15 shades, hindu necklaces and little silver bells around her ankles his real mother though?
Now I must confess that I found myself frequently scratching my head in the first part of this book, struggling to find out exactly what was happening. I felt as if I were watching a film through frosted class - I couldn't quite get the picture into focus and I felt distanced. Most of the pieces do fall into place later in the novel, but still there is still a need to suspend a fair old bit of disbelief, and I am still not convinced about Dial's motives for taking Che in the first place.
For me the book really began to pull together once the pair move into a hut in the inhospitable Queensland wilds, and find themselves part of an equally inhospitable hippy community (based on a commune Carey had once been part of) guaranteed to knock any residual nostalgia for the good old '60's and 70's firmly on the head.
(I must add a note here while I remember that I am thinking of founding a society for the prevention of cruelty to fictional animals, because the incident with the cat was totally uncalled for, I thought.)
The great strength of the book is in Carey's ability to create characters we can fully believe in and want to root for. His portrait of the watchful, needy Che is pitch perfect. We sympathise deeply with Dial, torn between regret for opportunities lost (she was due to start a new career as a college when she found herself drawn into her friend's mess) and her fierce love for Che whom she took care of for a time when he was a baby. The narrative is told at times from her perspective, at times from his, and I very much like the way that sometimes the same event (most notably the actual abduction) is viewed through both sets of eyes to show the differences in the child's and the adult's perception.
There's also Trevor, their neighbour in the commune is just the kind of wily rascal that Carey excels at creating, who gradually assumes the role of a father figure to Che and lover to Dial.
It's a sort of modern adage that there are two kinds of families, those we are born into, and those we struggle to create. In his novels, Carey frequently draws characters who are in some sense orphaned as these three are. The love that grows gradually between them is earthy and real. So real in fact that I wanted to spin the last few chapters of the book out for as long as possible, though when I got there, the life-affirming ending had me cheering.
So in the end, yes, I was a satisfied reader, although I didn't feel as strongly for the book as I have done for most of Carey's other novels, notably True History of the Kelly Gang and Theft.
Will the novel get Bookered? I bet.
If you want to know more about the book, here are some leads you might follow :
Carey is my darling*and I'm so scared of even the teensiest spoiler in Jackie McGlone's piece that my eyes skip over (for the moment at least) all mention of the novel, but fasten onto all the little snippets about Carey the man and Carey the writer.
Some insights into his creative process:
... What really fascinates me ... is the power of the imagination. I believe that writers should write about what they don't know, not about what they do know. Some of my students become trapped in their own lives, churning over the crimes of parents and siblings, which stops them discovering the incredible joys of invention.
... Perhaps it was writing The True History of the Ned Kelly Gang that really freed me up – maybe it was being brave enough to abandon all punctuation in that book that did it. Getting rid of punctuation means you have to get rid of all sorts of sloppiness in your writing, you have to be really, really exact. And it allowed me to be playful with language, which is what I'd admired in serious literature when I first started to read it when I was about 18.
... Writing's a mysterious process. It doesn't do to analyse it too much. This will sound romantic coming from me, but I do feel it's often like I've been through a fit of madness. When I'm a little anxious or insecure, I'll take down one of my earlier books to try and cheer myself up. It never works. I either think, 'God, this is crap!' or 'This is good, I couldn't do that again!' Sometimes, though, it's like someone else wrote a particular book."
McGlone adds some previously quoted Carey nuggets:
On creating characters:
I do not speak to them outside working hours, although the pleasures of creating proper characters is enormous, especially since novelists are prone to magical thinking anyway. You write something; then you meet someone who's exactly like the person you invented. My novel Illywhacker has some of that argument about it – the storyteller, Badgery, tells lies which later become truths."
On writing novels:
It's a privileged way to spend your mornings. When you have made some nice sentences, how thrilling is that? And then you get to go to lunch – I'm enthusiastic about lunch.
On the unexamined life:
For a writer it's the only one worth living. As a human I'm better off knowing why I do things, but as a writer I don't want to know. Everything that happens to me goes down like sediment to the bottom of the river. I do draw on that swampy stuff, but it's better not to know where it came from; also it's a good excuse not to improve my character.
Here's the trailer for the new novel:
*Reminder to self, try to be more cool and detached as a literary blogger ...
