Six Books About Australia

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
Voss by Patrick White
The Welcome to Country Handbook by Marcia Langton
Walkabout by James Vance Marshall
Connardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard
The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

One prisoner, a former actor named William Hunt, "who in his younger days had belonged to a company of strolling mountebanks," disguised himself as an enormous "boomer" or male kangaroo. He nearly got across to Forestier's Peninsula before two picket-guards, thinking he really was a kangaroo, spotted him and gave chase, leveling their muskets. "Don't shoot, I am only Billy Hunt," the nervous marsupial squeaked, in their consternation."

On my recent trip to Sydney I visited the Hyde Park Barracks, basically a housing unit for convicted English criminals who were sentenced to "transportation," that is, exile to Australia for their crimes. The barracks are barracks, not a prison--Australia was the prison. But what does it mean for a whole continent to be a prison? Robert Hughes' history The Fatal Shore details the Australian transportation system from the landing of the "First Fleet" in 1788 to its end in the late 19th century. I was searching for a general history of Australia, but one thing Hughes' book makes clear is that, as far as European settlement goes, the history of transportation is the history of Australia, which makes it all the more incredible that, according to Hughes, the social stigma around the "Stain" made it impossible to talk about Australia's convict past for most of the 20th century. Australians might take comfort in Hughes' point that, in creating one of the world's safest countries, with one of its highest standards of living, the nation is proof against the eugenicist belief that "criminality" is a heritable trait.

Hughes makes pointed comparisons between the transportation system and the Russian gulag of the 20th century, both attempts to deal with social problems wholesale by exiling "problematic" sections of society. Transportation, Hughes notes, precedes Bentham's idea of the modern penitentiary, and its invention was an attempt to deal with what seemed like an insoluble problem: where do we put all these criminals? The First Fleet of 1788 dealt with a grueling eight-month ocean crossing to find themselves on the other side of the world in a poor harbor racked with disease and little arable land; with these meager tools they were meant to build their own society. Early Sydney was hell for soldier and prisoner both, and many soldiers remarked on how little difference there seemed to be between them. As free settlers begin to make their way to Australia, the "System" grows in its cruelty, becoming more punitive and violent, perhaps to make the class distinctions more obvious and iron-clad. A basic fact that I didn't understand is that convicts would be leased out as workers to free settlers. And yet, a prisoner who did well could receive a "ticket of leave" to work for themselves, and once their time was up, many stayed, becoming themselves powerful landowners who were sought after as masters by other convicts, being more understanding.

Hughes describes a 19th century Australia whose key social distinction is between "Exclusives" and "Emancipists"--that is, free settlers seeking to maintain their social superiority and freed convicts who had been elevated to the ranks of polite society. Although the elevation of "Emancipists" ended with the relatively liberal government of Lachlan Macquarie, whose successors were those who hardened and strengthened the penal system, this conflict seems to have shaped Australian society up until the moment that transportation ended and, embarrassed by "the Stain," everyone agreed to forget all about the System. Hughes tells an interesting anecdote about a former prison ship that briefly opened as a public attraction before being sunk by irate Tasmanians, whose former colony of Van Diemen's Land was the harshest and longest-lasting of the various colonies. As an aside, I thought that Hughes' book was really well-written for a general history, full of interesting anecdotes and a dry sense of humor that made it a real pleasure to read.

'Voss did not die,' Miss Trevelyan replied. 'He is there still, it is said, in the country, and always will be. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been troubled by it.'

'Come, come. If we are not certain of the facts, how is it possible to give the answers?'

'The air will tell us,' Miss Trevelyan said.

The class distinctions between Exclusive and Emancipist provide an interesting window into Patrick White's classic novel of Australian exploration, Voss: Bonner, the explorer's wealthy patron, is a free settler whose "subscription" to the exploration is a kind of social expense meant to distinguish him as a gentleman. Bonner, like most of Australia's free settlers, is a mediocrity who takes advantage of the fresh country to make an attempt at a gentility that he wouldn't have had in England. The household servant, Rose, whose illegitimate pregnancy causes the family so much trouble, is an emancipated convict; in Laura's attempt to adopt Rose's baby (after her death) one can see the porous borders of early Australian society, and the desperation of those like the Bonners to keep them hardened. The novel's other Emancipist is Judd, the former convict who is Voss' foil on the expedition. Judd, having made his claim to the new country by toil and suffering, has a kind of practicality that Voss lacks; it's no coincidence that he alone survives the expedition. And yet, White makes it clear that Australia "belongs" to Voss, and not to Judd, by right of a kind of vision that Judd lacks, perhaps because Voss is outside the system that has so circumscribed the roles of Judd, Bonner, and Rose.

Voss' outsider-ness makes him, perhaps, more akin to the aboriginal people who make up such an important part of the exploration. Hughes describes how, among prisoners, Aboriginal Australians were thought of as being on the side of the jailers, since they had legal protections the prisoners did not, and were often used as "trackers" to bring back escapees. Judd ends up in a party with the older Dugald and younger Jacky, perhaps an uneasy union. But the country they enter into clearly belongs to those Aboriginal people who have never, like Dugald and Jacky, entered into a compact with white society--I recall easily one of my favorite scenes, where Dugald, having rejoined a tribe of Aboriginal kinsmen, rips apart the letters entrusted to him, whose pieces the tribe watches fly away in wonder. Voss and co. eventually find themselves in the keeping of another such group. Physically depleted by their journey, they are neither prisoners nor wards; they simply have nowhere else to go. There's a kind of mysticality at work here, a suggestion that the Aboriginal Australians belong to a kind of metaphysically different world, but I would argue that what is clearest is that "Country" belongs to them. Voss, by the power of his own vision and separateness, comes closest to achieving what has been natural to them for millennia.

There's something risky about revisiting your favorite books. Voss was my first of White's novels, and one thing that surprised me is that it is, prose-wise, rather ordinary compared to some of his other stuff, which tends toward the grotesque and the physical in ways that are not present here. It struck me actually as the most readable of White's books, which was a huge shock. But I was gratified to find it as good as I remembered. The psychic connection between Voss and Bonner's niece Laura produces the novel's most genius passages; the way that White manages to persuade the reader that Laura is present with Voss in the Outback even as she is physically in her Sydney estate takes one's breath away. And it was a special experience to read this novel just before my own trip to the Outback, where I got a great sense of the vastness of the hostile country from the hotel lobby bar where I spent much of my time sitting.

Why should we learn about the history of human life and the environment in this country in the time before the British arrived? Because most of the human history on this continent is that of the First Peoples, who lived here for tens of thousands of years. Their descendants--the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples--continue to follow and respect the ancient traditions and customs that make this country unique. It is likely that these are the oldest continuous living cultures surviving anywhere on the planet.

I turned to Marcia Langton's The Welcome to Country Handbook to help me understand a little more about the Aboriginal cultures that are, in a real sense, at the heart of Voss. As Langton points out, it is possible for Aboriginal people to make a remarkable claim to being the oldest living culture, perhaps up to 60,000 years old. Hughes describes the Aboriginal peoples encountered by the First Fleet as stunningly primitive compared to Native American societies encountered by settlers in North America; it is a wholly other perspective to consider that what the First Fleet found was a culture that had evolved in tandem with the continent over incalculable generations. Langton's book is an introduction to Aboriginal peoples for curious tourists, and hits some of the highlights one might expect: the 20th century renaissance and market for Aboriginal artwork, the political conflicts between Aboriginal Australians and the federal government, the diversity of Aboriginal languages and societies, etc.

I found this book mostly disappointing. First of all, 90% of what it cites are websites. It's written, too, like a website, perhaps one belonging to some kind of NGO: "Through storytelling, history, beliefs and knowledge about people, places and the world are relayed to each new generation." OK. To be generous, it seems to be written for a curious tourist who knows very little not just about Aboriginal Australians but Indigenous peoples, or race and culture more generally. That's fine, perhaps, but it means that there is a limit to the depth it is able to accomplish. Is it necessary to sit through a chapter that describes what racism is, or race?

But when the book does manage to say something specific, I found it pretty fascinating. I enjoyed learning, for instance, about the complex ordering of Yolŋu society, in which everything is considered to be one of two "moieties," even people, and marriage must be endogamous across these two moieties. Langton describes a highly ordered society in which dozens of familial relationships are recognized, if not more, and I got the sense--perhaps only through implication--that other Aboriginal groups have similar practices. Furthermore, I was interested in the way that Aboriginal Australians seem to share meaningful qualities with Native Americans and Black Americans, both as the original inhabitants of the country who were the victims of attempted genocide, and as a racialized class whose "blackness" forms a meaningful structure of their identity.

She felt compassionate: charitable: virtuous. Like a dignitary bestowing some supremely preciosu gicft, she handed her panties to the naked Aboriginal.

He took them shyly: wonderingly: not knowing what they were for. He put the worwora down, and examined the gift more closely.  His fingers explored the elastic top. It flick-back was something he didn't understand. (Bark thread and liana vine didn't behave like this.) He stretched the elastic taut; tested it; experimented with it, was trying to unravel it when Peter came to his aid.

'Hey, don't undo 'em, darkie! Put 'em on. One foot in here, one foot in there. Then pull 'em up.'

Now let me turn to two novels that explore interactions between white European-Australians and Aboriginal people. The first is Walkabout, James Vance Marshall's novel about two young children who survive a plane crash on their way to Adelaide. Foolishly, the children begin to walk in the direction of what they believe to have been their destination, although they're still in the Northern Territory--and will never survive. They are saved when they come across a young Aboriginal boy on "walkabout," cast here as a traditional rite of solo exploration (but which, as I understand it, really refers to the period in which Aboriginal people employed on cattle stations would return to their communities in the off season). The Aboriginal boy has skills that the two white children desperately need; he shows them how to procure water from below the dirt and which plants are edible, as well as how to catch and kill wallabies and echidnas. The two children, who are from Charleston, South Carolina, refer to their new friend as "darkie."

Of the two, the young boy Peter adjusts most easily to their new reality, choosing to go naked as the Aboriginal boy does. The older girl, Mary, has more misgivings, and her embarrassment for the boy's nakedness leads her to make a gift of her own panties, which he puts on with much good humor. (What a moment there is here for scholars of both race and gender!) In this way, Walkabout presents what seems to my eye a pretty typical conflict between "civilization" and its antithesis. Mary's unthinking hierarchies are challenged by the Aboriginal boy, even as the novel reifies the difference between them. It must be said that the fate of the Aboriginal boy seems to reflect the tragedies of Australian history: he catches Peter's cold and dies, having sacrificed himself to save them. Interestingly, Marshall ascribes the boy's death partially to an Aboriginal belief that death is inevitable once it has chosen you, and must be faced with equanimity: even before he catches Peter's cold, the boy sees in Mary's hostility a kind of "evil eye" that presages his death. Whether there's any basis for this belief, I don't know, but I saw it again in the case of one of the hired hands of the next novel, Coonardoo.

She was like his own soul riding there, dark, passionate and childlike. In all this wide empty world Coonardoo was the only living thing he could speak to. Hugh knew; the only creature who understood what he was feeling, and was feeling for him. yet he was afraid of her, resented a secret understanding between them.

But Coonardoo the playmate--Coonardoo whom he had seen long ago under the shower, young and slender, her lithe brown body, wet and gleaming, brown eyes laughing at him, her hair, wavy and sun-burnished, lying in wet streaks about her head. Coonardoo? Why should he hurt her by a harsh, indifferent manner he showed nowhere else?

Coonardoo is set on a cattle station in Western Australia in the early 20th century. It centers on Hugh Watt, the owner of the station Wytaliba. The life of a white man in the remote bush is a strange one, and Hugh struggles to find a white woman who will accept such a life. His first choice, Jessica, goes back home after a week, and his eventual wife, Mary, becomes so embittered by the experience that she takes their six daughters and moves back to the nearest town. Hugh finds brief comfort in a dalliance with Coonardoo, an Aboriginal housekeeper who he has entrusted, like his mother before him, with the station's management. The back of the book describes this dalliance as a kind of forbidden love, but I wonder if that's true--it might have been, perhaps, if Hugh's own ideological commitment to racial separation hadn't kept him from suppressing his feelings for Conardoo. In either case, the brief affair produces a son, Winni, whose favor by Hugh is what tips Mary off to her husband's infidelity.

Coonardoo is an interesting document on interracial relationships. It must have been quite scandalous when Katherine Susannah Pritchard published it in 1926, when I can only imagine that relationships between whites and Aboriginal people would have been rather outside the pale of literature. But Pritchard shows how such things might be possible on a remote station in the Australian bush, far from the polite society of town, where a white man might spend his life among the Aboriginal people attached to his station (they seem to be neither enslaved or employed, but associated somehow) while his nearest white neighbors might be a day's ride away. The villain of Conardoo is a station owner named Sam Geary who lives openly with his "gin" (I think this term is now considered offensive), who desires Conardoo for his own, and keeps pressing Hugh to sell his rights to her, whatever those might be. Is Geary's sin the way he treats his own Aboriginal wife, Sheba, or merely his openness about it?

After Mary leaves, Hugh finally accepts Coonardoo as his "woman," something that he had been loathe to do, but even then treats her coldly, never returning to her bed after the one sexual encounter that produced Winni. Part of me wants to read Coonardoo as a novel of repression about a man whose racial ideology is so strong he can never let himself embrace the one relationship that might have made him happy. But I wonder, too, if Pritchard herself is able to imagine this relationship, or if it remains elusive for the writer in her period. More troubling yet is that Coonardoo herself seems kind of an absence in the middle of the text, a character that the novel is really unable to look squarely at or understand--at least, that is, until the final chapter, when an older and disillusioned Coonardoo returns to Wytaliba at the end of her life to look up on its ruin, and think about what might have been.

What do tourists do? They walk, they stand, they look, they buy. They fumble for money on buses, not knowing whether to pay the driver or the conductor.  They visit famous monuments, fountains, old houses full of stone and shutters and anachronistic lace. They notice that the day without duty passes with the slowness of a dream. They know that their existence is without point. They envy those who go arm in arm, who have a home to go to.

Finally, a novel of modern Australia. Helen Garner's novel The Children's Bach is set in suburban Melbourne, where the reunification of two old college friends, Dexter and Elizabeth, causes a disruption in both their lives. Dexter is a family man, brash and outlandish, who rails against "Americanisms" while his wife Athena takes care of their two children. Elizabeth is more adrift, unmarried, cynical, living in an unfurnished loft. When the two run into each other, Elizabeth brings two new presences into the life of Dexter's family. The first is Vicki, Elizabeth's much younger sister, who finds in their suburban home a foothold in life that Elizabeth's loft will never provide. The other is Philip, Elizabeth's sometimes boyfriend, a rock musician who persuades Athena to run away with him on a holiday to Sydney, much to the obvious chagrin of Dexter.

I admit I didn't see the pivot in this one coming. Vicki describes Athena as "perfect"--the perfect woman, the perfect wife. And early on, she seems to have a kind of stolid devotion to Dexter and their life; Vicki admires the pair of them for their frankness with each other. But an early sign that all is not well with Athena is the way she talks about their disabled son, Billy. "Don't bother getting romantic," Athena tells Vicki, "There's nobody in there." She admits, "I'm just hanging on till we can get rid of him," and says, "I've abandoned him, in my heart." In a novel that is otherwise quite small, filled with minor domestic gestures, the cruelty on display here really stands out as shocking, as does the moment that Vicki and Athena bond over the impulse they share to push the boy in front of an oncoming car. Billy, such as he is, seems to represent a kind of problem, a challenge to the kind of life that Dexter and Athena live, that can only be solved by exile. Athena's sudden abandonment of Dexter makes sense in this context, then: "Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences. Perhaps this never-quite-present Philip might be that mythical creature, a man who was utterly scrupulous and who was yet prepared to do anything. Perhaps she too might never apologise, never explain."

Back in Melbourne, Dexter commiserates by getting drunk with--and sleeping with--Vicki. This is a huge blow to his self-conception as a nobler person: "Tis was modern life, then, this seamless logic, this common sense, this silent tit-for-tat. This was what people did. He did not like it. He hated it. But he was in his moral universe now, and he could never go back." But it seems to me what Dexter fails to understand is that he's always been in this moral universe, however much he feels as if he has been above it, and Athena's abandonment of him for Philip is only proof that this is true. There's something very antiquated in Dexter's attempt to find moral absolution in the suburban family life, rather than its epitome, and he may be the only one surprised that such an attempt could fail.

I really enjoyed this one. Brent said there's something Muriel Spark about it, and though there might be a "Guy whose only seen Boss Baby" element to that, I think it's true. In its reticence, its cultivation of the opacity of these characters--which is what allows Athena's desperate move to shock us--I saw a bit of Henry Green as well. And part of that opacity is that I feel like there's something that eludes me about the novel, and makes me want to return to it; I don't think this will be the last book of hers I read.

So, this is an interesting place to end up: Australia's penal past makes it unique among world countries, but in its persecution of an Indigenous racial underclass, it ends up following familiar forms, especially to those of whose who are American. And in the end, though Dexter may hate the way that American culture imposes its ideas on Australians, it presents a 20th century story of suburban anomie that us Americans find utterly recognizable.

The Lord by Soraya Antonius

But the countryside informers, who regularly sent in reports of all events, ordianry or not, mentioned that he was a most remarkable conjuror. Instead of pulling silk block-stamped scarves out of his sleeves and giving one of them to the girl who was due to be married during the feast and later selling the rest, or eggs out of his nostrils, or baby quails out his ears, he walked through walls of houses, "where there's no door," added a report painstakingly. Some brushwood blaze got out of hand in one village and threatened the mounds of unthreshed and as yet unallotted wheat: he had put it out in a flash, from a long way away, without buckets of water. He had told it to go out.

A journalist in Israel makes the acquaintance of an old British emigre named Miss Alice, who has been in the country since it was known as Mandatory Palestine. Miss Alice has a story that is of interest to the journalist, one of time before the creation of the state of Israel, when tensions between Jews, Arabs, and their British overlords ran particularly high. This story concerns a man named Tareq, who once was a pupil of Miss Alice's, a charming but mediocre student who disappears and reemerges as a traveling conjuror--the equivalent of a children's magician. As a magician, Tareq is without equal, able to do more than simple parlor tricks, changing water into wine and British homburgs into highly symbolic keffiyehs. Tareq's act catches the attention of a British police chief named Challis, who suspects the magician of sedition, and who, on top of everything else, has a pure personal dislike of him. Challis makes the capture and execution of Tareq his obsession, bordering on mania.

Many questions surround the circumstances described in Soraya Antonius' The Lord. One is: what kind of magician is Tareq, really? Is he simply a very talented charlatan, or is he actually capable of a kind of sorcery? When one of the book's secondary characters, a British journalist named Egerton, is injured in the middle of the wilderness on a trip through Galilee, Tareq's sudden appearance is mystical and startling enough that we are ready to believe that he is the real deal. Other questions branch off of this one: how subversive is Tareq's act, really? There is a certain slyness to it, certainly, but there's a big difference between the symbolism of the transforming accessories and stoking the Arab resistance to British rule, as Challis suspects Tareq is doing. If Tareq is only a magician, Challis' enmity is another open question--why does he hate the guy so much? Antonius' narrator-journalist, interpolating Miss Alice's story, even suggests at one point that latent same-sex attraction (in this case, "buggery") is at the root of some British officials' enmity toward Arab men. But the irony of Challis' persecution of Tareq is that, if Tareq isn't a rebel leader, Challis seems intent on turning him into one, and the more he pursues him, the more Arab communities are caught in the crossfires of the man's mania, breeding resentment and rebellion.

I thought this was pretty good. There are parts of the book I couldn't quite follow: Tareq is brought within Challis' web by a convoluted chain of events that begins with Berthaina, a woman married to a much older widower who turns to Tareq's magic to help her have a child after a series of miscarriages, and for whom Tareq falls quietly. Berthaina's involvement with Tareq results in her house being destroyed, part of a British zeal for razing Palestinian houses, and roping in Tareq's mother, whose resentment at being forced to care for the now homeless woman ends up driving her into the arms of the British mandate. Or something like that. And I thought the B-story of a young Miss Alice's flirtation with a genteel British officer fell pretty flat.

But I also thought that The Lord captured in rich and fascinating detail a moment in history that has been obscured by succeeding events. Tareq's Palestine is a powderkeg waiting to blow, a very old and diverse country that is run indifferently by the British, whose priggishness and sense of birthright keeps them from understanding the people whose stewards they claim to be. As far as I can tell there are no named Jewish characters in The Lord, but it shows how the folly of empire sets up the Nakba to come, and how the British were using the destruction of homes as a means to suppress the Arab population long before the success of the Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel. It's all the British Empire's fault, basically. But beyond this it's a gripping story of intrigue and resolve, and of people who refuse to give up their vitality and dignity to the powers who demand it as sacrifice.

The Stars at Noon by Denis Johnson

I crossed the frontier from Costa Rica in the south, down from the cool hills, through the soggy checkpoints, and right into the factory of bugs in the towering grass this side of the border, bugs raining down through the air, a perpetual cloud of them overshadowing the Lago de Nicaragua so that they cake, absolutely putty--I'm talking about bugs--all these leprous diesel-spewing vehicles trying to crawl through the choking deluge... I don't know at what point, maybe it's as you pass the second or third miserable sugar refinery looking like a prison, that you realize you've been ejected from Paradise. And whatever these stunned, drenched people did to get themselves banished here is an absolute mystery. Like your own mortal error...

The narrator of Denis Johnson's The Stars at Noon is an American in Nicaragua during the time of the conflict between the ruling Sandinistas and the U.S.-backed contras. She claims at one point to be connected to an organization called for "Eyes for Peace," and at another point to be a journalist, though when she calls her publication, it seems to be a two-bit fashion magazine that has no interest in Nicaragua, or, frankly, her. Professionally, the most that can be said about her for certain is that she is a prostitute, picking up various men for favors or money. One of these is a pasty Englishman who turns out to be in a lot of hot water for divulging oil business secrets to a neighboring government. In an uncharacteristic fit of empathy, and perhaps because she has fallen for him in a way that only makes sense as the exception that proves the rule of her own hardened heart, she seeks to help him, but she's a poor helper, being in hot water herself: she desperately needs someone to exchange her Nicaraguan money for U.S. dollars, the only currency that can pay for a way out of Nicaragua.

Johnson once said something to the effect of, "I am Graham Greene" (I dunno, look it up), a sentiment that makes little sense of all you've read of him are Angels or Jesus' Son. But this book really is Johnson in Greene mode, a la The Laughing Monsters or the Vietnam sections of Tree of Smoke, thick in the middle of a foreign crisis where intelligence is always shifting and any given person may be an ally or an enemy. Johnson is really good in this mode, and his books capture something of the inherent uncertainty of espionage, where nothing is ever truly revealed and even your own motivations are somehow concealed. The pair of lovers in The Stars at Noon are really fucked, because neither of them knows what they are doing, and any shrewdness or spark of insight they exhibit pales, we see, in comparison to the forces that wish to punish the Englishman for his corporate transgressions. I was reminded not only of Greene but of another writer who wrote about Americans adrift in banana republics, Joan Didion.

The Stars at Noon is no Tree of Smoke, and I thought it wasn't quite a Laughing Monsters, either, but it succeeds on the strength of the voice of the main character: bitter, desperate, sarcastic, fatalistic. We never really learn what it is she's doing there or how she got there, but it's easy to buy her as a two-bit schemer whose guile conceals a fundamental waywardness. The central romance, if that's what it is, works because it seems so improbable, and the two are so ill-matched; the Englishman (as he's called) is as reserved and buttoned-up as she is uncouth. Somehow they seem to complement each other, and not just because they are both in desperate straits. The novel moves from Managua to the pair's attempt to escape to the Costa Rican border, and it seems they know as well as the reader does that they are only hurtling toward their own doom. Johnson's Nicaragua is a chaotic mess, a literal hell as the narrator describes it, but as a failed state it seems only to match the inner life of the narrator.

The Carpathians by Janet Frame

She thought, surprised at such a natural event, 'Why, it's raining.' Yet the falling rain was not 'real' rain. Specks, some small as carrot seed (George Coker had shown her his packets of garden seed), others as large, mapped purple and grey, as beanseed, some like hundreds-and-thousands, others like dew-drops set with polished diamonds, rubies, emeralds; or plain dew-drops that flowed in changing shapes among the layers of seeds and seed-pearls and jewels white and brown and red pellets of clay and then earth-coloured flecks of mould; smears of dung, animal and human, and every 'raindrop' and mixture of jewels and waste, in shapes of the 'old' punctuation and language--apostrophes, notes of music, letters of the alphabets of all languages. The rain was at once alive in its falling and flowing; and dead, for it was voiceless, completely without sound. The only sound was the continuing rage from the people of Kowhai Street.

Mattina Brecon is the rich American wife of a once-successful novelist. Her hobby is long vacations in which she stays in one place, trying to know it as best she can, and her latest trip takes her to the small town of Puamahara in New Zealand. What draws her to the town is the legend of the Memory Flower, an ancient... uh, flower... that holds all... memories? It's pretty unclear, but whatever it is, it's been seized upon by the tourist board, and whoever Mattina talks to on Kowhai Street where she has taken up residence regards it as little more than a tourist gimmick. The Memory Flower is one of two mysterious phenomena that exert their influence on The Carpathians; the other is the "Gravity Star," which is some kind of scientific phenomenon that has the power to erase distance, separation, particularity, to turn the mountains of New Zealand into the Carpathians of eastern Europe. Neither the Memory Flower nor the Gravity Star is ever explained in any real way, but the influence they exert is powerful, especially on Kowhai Street, which seems to be the focal point for metaphysical powers with the ability to transform life entirely.

The Carpathians is a strange book in how not strange it can be. Much of it seems to be the fairly simple story of a woman who travels to a part of the world that is strange to her and tries, and mostly fails, to get to know people. They're far more interested in a murder that has recently occurred on the street than whatever the "Memory Flower" is, and they want to hear stories about American places they know by name, like San Francisco and Miami. Not only is Mattina unable to connect with these people, they seem to barely be able to connect with each other. But eventually the Gravity Star comes to bear: in the middle of the night, Mattina is woken by the sound of all the residents of Kowhai Street walking into their yard and screaming. A rain pours down letters, numbers, punctuation marks, that gather, real enough, on the edge of the windowsill. The next day, all of the residents are gone, and Mattina is unable to get anyone else in Puamahara to take their disappearance seriously. The best she can do is buy up the vacant properties, which she will leave for her husband and son to visit later, and pay witness to.

What is this book all about? The Gravity Star, whatever it might be on a literal level, seems to have the potential to truly transform human life on the planet. Who needs language when there is a power that can literally bring what is distant close? Language, words, have mostly failed us; they have not provided the residents of Kowhai Street with a sufficient means to enter into each others' lives. The happiest among them might be a non-verbal autistic daughter, placed in a local home, who will never be able to express what she is feeling, whether happiness or something else, to her parents. But if the scene of the alphabet rain is a sign that the Gravity Star is obliterating language in exchange for something else, why is it that all the people disappear? Have they been brought closer, or brought together, or have they simply been annihilated? It's a strange, strange scene in a deceptively strange book, made stranger by small details, like the fact that it seems to be simultaneously "written" by a local amateur named Dinny Wheatstone and Mattina's son John Henry. I didn't find it as immediately gratifying as Frame's Owls Do Cry, which I read last year and loved, but that scene--the screaming, the jewel-and-shit-encrusted letters falling from the sky--is certain to stick with me.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

Widespread Planet, same person as that piece of work Cause Man Steel, while thinking clear-headed higher rather than thinking low, was confident about how he would survive the climate emergency. He avoided the crowd--which meant humanity--and chose to be as some kind of crepuscular man, moving around the isolated bush by himself in the twilight hours in pursuit of his business venture, to put into action far more grandiose plans about how to make real money.

The aboriginal town of Praiseworthy in Australia's Northern Territory has been covered with an impenetrable haze. It's making everyone irritable, but it puts an idea into the head of one Cause Man Steel, who anticipates the worsening of climate change and the need for radical change: he'll collect a herd of feral donkeys that can be used for transport when fuel is no longer available. Cause, also known as Widespread and Planet--because he's. you know, everywhere--is especially in search of a special platinum-colored donkey he thinks will be the key to the whole scheme, for not particularly clear reasons. But the noisy, stinky donkeys only make Cause unpopular in town, and worsen the fractures in his own family: his wife Dance dreams of moving to China; his son Aboriginal Sovereignty commits suicide by drowning himself after being torn away from the younger girl who was his betrothed; his younger son Tommyhawk goes full-on "fascist" and tries to make his dreams of being adopted by the country's white minister of Aboriginal Affairs come true.

Above all, Praiseworthy is a satire on the paternalistic attitude of the Australian government towards Aboriginal people. The book presents a series of complaints, none of which I knew before: the government identified an epidemic of pedophilia among the country's outstation communities, banned pornography, keeps Aboriginal assets on a kind of controlled credit card with major restrictions. Aboriginal Sovereignty, a young man betrothed to a teenager (we never see her) is a victim of this paternalism, whereas his brother Tommyhawk absorbs the government propaganda wholeheartedly, considering everyone in Praiseworthy, including and especially his own father, a pedophile. And the "death of Aboriginal Sovereignty" has its own obvious secondary meaning, though Ab. Sov.'s death is more enigmatic and less final than such a phrase would seem. Cause, though short-sighted and selfish, represents a kind of trickster figure who stands against this paternalism, desperate to eke out a bit of autonomy and agency in a world that wishes to convince him it's better to play along.

This is the second book of Wright's I've read after Carpentaria, and I think I liked this one more, though it's possible that I was just better prepared for it. Wright's prose is still somewhat baffling to me, wordy and junky, full of cliches and weird circumlocutions. Nouns become adjectives and vice versa, and some of them even become verbs. I wondered more than once when reading both books if there's something about the strange, dense language that reflects Aboriginal dialect, but that would only be speculation on my part. I don't think I can get to the level of the writing being good, but it certainly works on its own terms, and the experience of diving into this 600-page tome is pretty brainmelting. I enjoyed it, but I'm glad to put it behind me, because it's one of those books that does something to your own words, you know? And moreso than in Carpentaria, I thought Praiseworthy reached more than once a feverish state where the clunky prose was transformed into something strikingly modernist, especially in the scenes where Aboriginal Sovereignty is described as mingling among the traditional spirits of the sea. Praiseworthy is one of those books I don't think I'd ever recommend, but if you get it, you get it.

The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov

"We're gonna make it to Italy. Everything'll change," said Serafim. "There'll be no more Moldovan mud in our lives, no more terrible poverty hanging over our heads like a scab on a bald tramp's noggin. No more of this interminable, hellish work, which makes you want to howl louder than a dog on the doorstep o fa penny-pinching priest."

The dream of everyone in Moldova, Europe's poorest country, seems to be to move to Italy, where work, one hears, is plentiful. Of course, dreaming is one thing, and doing is another. In a town called Larga, the citizens hatch a number of wild schemes, led by one Serafim: they pretend to be a curling team, en route to a tournament in Italy, but the driver who takes their money simply drives them around Moldova before dropping them off in Chisinau, pretending it's Rome. They build an airplane, then a submarine, out of the remnants of an old tractor, but in each case are turned back by the Italian armed forces. Even the president of Moldova gets in on the action, faking a plane crash on an Italian mountainside so that he can sneak into the country and take up the more desirable life of a migrant worker. But through all this, Italy remains a dream, a kind of symbolic Eden always just beyond the schemers' reach.

Eden, paradise, heaven--these words are not hyperbole. So strong is the image of Italy in the mind of the Moldovans that Larga's priest gins up a crusade to bring the faithful to the Italian promised land. When it doesn't work, he tries again with a children's crusade, just like the real crusades. The belief in Italy is so strong that it generates equally strong naysayers: one of the village's old men insists that Italy is, in fact, a myth, and doesn't really exist. For this heresy he is tortured and killed. In this way, author Vladimir Lorchenkov takes the dream of immigration to its most absurd extremes, turning The Good Life Elsewhere into a shaggy dog-satire that reminded me of some of the work of Bohumil Hrabal. The book is extremely dark--one of the first thing that happens is that the wife of one of the protagonist hangs herself from a tree as apology for the failed curling team scheme--but profoundly funny, and illuminating of a part of Europe that is typically forgotten, if not ignored completely.

With the addition of Moldova, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Perhaps one of the dead women I'd seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silene. There is nothing we can do about it.

Thirty-nine women are gathered in an underground bunker. They are watched over by three male guards, and their days are torture: the lights are kept on all the time; they are given meager food and made to cook it themselves; they are whipped if they touch each other. They can remember their lives before they were imprisoned, but they can't remember how they got there, and the taciturn guards give no clues. They are sure they will live and die like this, in hell. One, a fortieth, is not a woman, but a girl, one who seems to have gotten mixed up among the others. She alone is too young to remember the world outside, and because the guards do such a good job isolating them, she grows up sullen and aloof, unable to connect with the other women who are so much like her. She is stunted, not going through a full puberty--her body, we're told, intuiting that its energies are better sent elsewhere--but she is shrewd. She is only beginning to warm up to her elders when a siren interrupts a mid-day meal, and the guards scatter, leaving the door open, and the women make their way to the surface.

I imagine that for many people who read I Who Have Never Known Men, a kind of cult book that has recently received a renewed following, the first and most obvious touchstone is The Handmaid's Tale. What regime is this, where men imprison women without wanting anything from them, not labor or sex--and why not just kill them? But a better comparison is (I know, I'm always talking about this one) Marlen Haushofer's The Wall, a book about a woman who finds herself in impossible, isolating circumstances with no information about what's happening to her or why. Like in The Wall, there is no explanation forthcoming; all the narrator can do is try her best to survive. When they emerge from the bunker, none of the women are even sure this featureless landscape is Earth; one theory has been that they have been transported somewhere. They come across other bunkers where it seems the residents were not so lucky to have an open door when their captors fled; all have died. Some even appear to be groups of men, which kind of throws a wrench into the whole gendered oppression thing.

The rest of the novel takes place over years, as the narrator's compatriots become old, and then die, as they have always known would happen. In the bunker, the women pity the narrator because they know that ultimately she will be left alone; above ground, it happens just the same. No explanations, no revelations means no surprises. It's interesting, though, to watch the small society that grows up among the women, how they feed and arrange themselves, how they manage the difficult relationship with their past selves, and how the narrator grows up among them, receiving an understanding of another world only secondhand. She, of all people, is made for this strange new world, though she feels keenly the lack of understanding and memory that others have. The book is so strange that it's hard to say what is revealed in this strange experiment--a glimpse, perhaps, of how one manages to get by in the face of the narrowness of any given life. But few lessons emerge for the narrator, as for us--whatever happened here, the only possible response is to live through it.

The Price of Their Toys by John P. Loonam

The red dress is still spread out on her side of the bed, and I reach down, run a hand along its empty length once again. I take off my pajamas, pick up the dress and, raising my arms above my head, slide it down, twist my shoulders through and tug the silky sheath past my belly. As the hem flutters against my thighs, I feel the dress fill up with flesh again and turn toward the mirror, looking for Anna's native grace to come alive in my own awkward pose, but see only my hairy chest and shoulders pushing out around those spaghetti straps, my belly stretching the fabric out of shape. From the window, a loud, raucous car horn gives an extended beep, followed by a voice, shouting the one word, "Pervert," loud and clear. I fall to my hands and knees, hiding behind the bed.

I'm really pleased to be able to write this review of The Price of Their Toys, a collection of stories by my friend and workshop partner John Loonam. Several of these stories I have seen in earlier drafts, and I enjoyed being reminded of several I had forgotten about. I had forgotten how much I enjoy John's story "Make the Man," in particular, about a man who is pushed, before he's ready, to get rid of his late wife's dresses, and begins to wear them instead. His private grieving is complicated by the increasing dementia of a neighbor across the street who has been showing up in his yard without clothes of any kind, and when these two collide of an emergency--man in dress meeting man without pants--the story reaches a kind of comic fervor that belies the deftness with which it deals with the difficulties of aging and loss. I think it's one of the best stories in the collection.

John's stories often take place in the Long Island suburbs, in bedroom communities where the Catholic Church continues to circumscribe the emotional and cultural range of what is possible. The stories really evoke an era of suburban life in the 60's and 70's that is, if not gone, surely drastically changed, and the stories show, to my mind, why such an existence might have been as fragile as it is narrow. I really liked one story I hadn't read, titled "Trump" (no relation) about a young gay Catholic school student who befriends the school's new and only Black student. The relationship becomes complicated by the attentions of a Father who is deeply unpopular among the student body, and the protagonist, Frankie, ends up choosing a difficult and violent betrayal to keep his precarious place in the school's ecosystem.

Another that I liked and hadn't read moves the action to Manhattan, where a young and disillusioned legal assistant becomes obsessed with Richard Nixon, who after the end of his presidency has moved his law office into a nearby building. The protagonist, for reasons that are unclear even to him, keeps demanding to be given access to the former president--who, in the end, shows up in the public plaza to give him a bit of dubious advice. This story, I thought, has only a tenuous relationship to the politics that are the invisible backdrop of so much of the book, but the parallels it draws between the failed president and the directionless protagonist, are really powerful.

It was a real honor and pleasure to see some of these stories being crafted, but the best part of The Price of Their Toys was, for me, getting to read the ones that were totally new to me. If you're interested, you can by John's book here.

Sister Carrie by Lauren Fairbanks

Would you be willing to give us a profound remark on the concept "LOVE" and what tie-ins that may have to Carrie?

My opinion? It may be a strange concept to you. It doesn't spurn those who abuse it most. I saw a man pick it up in a fistful, so that alone must have hurt. He hurled it against a wall, kicked it when it was down. I didn't see how Love could live. Love got up and begged for more. It got more of the same treatment only worse. Love is Rasputin. Then Love must have tired and, pulling a knife out of its beehive hairdo, slit the guy stomach to neck. Not pretty. But a clean cut. Now Love must be just as much a lonely stinkpig as the next guy. Meaner 'an hell. What happens when love comes to town.

Sister Carrie is about Carrie Meeber, a small-town girl who seeks her fortune in the big city. She falls in love with a rake named Hurstrwood--oh, wait, no. That's Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. In this one, Carrie is Asian-American, and her American Dream involves getting involved in two of the United States' most sinister industries: advertising and prostitution. She works for a pimp whose name is, you guessed it, Pimpo. The narrator, who reminds us time and again how omniscient he is, seems to seeking out information about Carrie's exploits, having risen from a humble prostitute to something of an underground legend. She may have killed a man, perhaps one named Valmouth, though it's possible that she and Valmouth are actually the same person. She has fallen for, and had a child with, a guy named Chuck, and both, perhaps, are on the lam? I don't know. It's actually really hard to tell what's going on in this book, if anything really can be said to be "going on" at all.

Lauren Fairbanks' avant-garde novel was a little too much for me: a little too avant, a little too garde. when I was able to let the spiky, irreverent language wash over me (check out the passage above), I entered into a state that resembled something like enjoyment. But ultimately I found the discursive, non-sequential nature of the narrative to be a little too much to penetrate. It reminded me of some of the more difficult books by John Hawkes, but I walked away fairly sure that there was nothing much that I had missed, because questions of fact and story really are irrelevant to Sister Carrie. It could be described perhaps as choral, with all the voices of the underground figures, from Pimpo to Carrie's mom Zenobia, layered over each other, but Carrie herself remains truly elusive, even to the book's end. And even now I fear that describing the book has laid a kind of sense or system that the book is trying hard to repel. So I'll stop here.

Airships by Barry Hannah

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers.  They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner was dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've survived. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop?

"Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed," one of the best stories in Barry Hannah's collection Airships, is narrated by a Confederate officer who meets his hero, Jeb Stuart. General Stuart suggests that the officer shake hands with his Black ensign, George, something the narrator hasn't done and isn't too happy about being constrained to do now. Except George takes one look at the narrator and correctly clocks that his interest in the General exceeds the bounds of simple admiration: "Ain't shaking hands with no nancy." I wonder if a reader from outside the South might find the humor in this, or if it would only confirm certain at-least-partly-true suspicions about the South. For my part, I love the way the story skewers the myths and pieties of the Old South. None of these people--not the officer, nor the ensign, nor even Jeb, a towering figure in Southern legend who's clearly happy with the myths he inspires--is quite what they seem. They're not too far off, in fact, from the whopping fish-tale swappers of the opening story, "Water Liars."

Many of the stories in Airships are about the South, though what they have to say about it is not always easy to parse. Mostly, I think, they tend to see the South as a place where, perhaps contrary to its reputation as a place of rigid social hierarchies, grand collisions happen. I was really delighted by "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa," a story about a white guy who chides a Black one for eating a banana with too much enthusiasm, which ends with the Black guy coming over to the white one's house to watch him eat bananas. Some of the stories are snappy and short, but the collection is held up by a series of longer novellas, the plots of which are so ridiculous I'm not sure I even want to waste time describing them. Take, for instance, "Return to Return," a story about a talented young tennis player driven mad by the attentions of his mother's long-time lover; is it even worth talking about how he ends up with a shady doctor named Baby, stabbing people in Central Park? It's a little easier, maybe, to guess how we get from the homemade mortar shells of "The Testimony of Pilot" to the fighter jets of the Second World War. These stories proceed by a strange logic, almost more like an unraveling then a building up--nothing about them is predictable.

Hannah shares DNA, I think, with a writer like Charles Portis: both write shaggy-dog stories about Southerners that are wildly funny. But Hannah's stories have a disquieting strangeness underneath them that begins with the way they pack a truly staggering amount of information into a paragraph, a sentence: check out that first paragraph above from "Green to Green," which piles absurdity upon absurdity. As a result, Hannah's prose is decidedly clunky and unmusical, though I don't even mean that as a criticism. The shorter ones have the air of someone flipping over a bag and letting all their bobs and bits onto a table; the longer ones can be said, by their end, to make a certain kind of sense, though I would challenge you to identify that sense at their beginning. All in all, I found them frequently difficult to penetrate, but always incredibly funny, energetic, and fun.