M.J. Hyland, This is How

Book cover courtesy
Text Publishing

*SPOILER ALERT*

We were envious of our absent travelling members as about seven of us gathered on a wintry evening to discuss this thought provoking novel. One of our travellers had emailed her response to the book - that lives can change catastrophically in a moment, as happened to the doomed, naive young Oxtoby, unloved by his family as being too "different".

We remarked on the very spare style of writing, with short, simple sentences using few adjectives so that it was difficult to tell exactly when it was set (maybe the sixties?). Some of us really liked the writing, and even though some normally prefer more lushly detailed prose with a rich sense of time and place (OK, me!), in this case we agreed that the lack of descriptive language and other digressions, along with the almost constant use of the present tense, helped the reader to be "in the head" of a character who would otherwise have been very difficult to understand. We remarked on the way the author created a sense of impending doom, building up tension with very few words, but odd, so you think there's something going on.

It was remarked that Oxtoby was a naive and dissociated person, lacking social skills and like an observer in his own life, almost mildly autistic. His parents, especially his father didn't understand him, saying that he "lacked the knack for happiness". He presumptuously assumed that his new landlady might be interested in him on first acquaintance. We noted the telling contradictions and repressed feelings around his response to the break-up with his girlfriend:

"She said she was breaking up with me because I didn't know how to express my emotions. The thing is, I didn't have that many. As far as I was concerned it was pretty simple. I was in love with her and I liked our life and we laughed a lot and it felt good to be in bed with her and have her touching me"...

"I wanted to push her down the stairs, make the kind of impression I didn't know how to make with words. But I didn't, and when she'd closed the front door I said 'OK then', and 'Goodbye, then.' Afterwards I played the scene over and over, imagined how I planted my hands in the middle of her back and pushed hard enough to send her flying.

And I got this sentence in my head, over and over, 'You broke my heart and now I've broken your spine'"...

We discussed the actual murder of his sleeping housemate, wondering to what extent the death was intentional.

"I take the adjustable wrench and go to his room... I step forward, lift the wrench in my right hand and bring it down. Only once, a good, certain blow to his temple, not heavy, and the wrench bounces..."

Yet in his own mind later it seemed to be a mere accident ("I only hit him once"). When asked in court, his acquaintances agreed with him that "he is not a murderer". As the author no doubt intended, this prompted us to wonder what a murderer was supposed to be like. We noticed that while Oxtoby seems to feel shame and embarrassment, he feels no actual guilt over the death. The guard remarked that everybody in the prison is innocent.

Oxtoby's response to the harsh, degrading reality of prison life was discussed. He had loved his Grandmother who had been able to get him to articulate what he most wanted to do with his life and was able to validate that for him. In prison he talks to a psychologist who is also able to connect with him. He is able to hug her, and use some of that good feeling to help his unappealing cellmate. It was remarked that the book's last scene also touched on the theme of male sexuality including homosexuality which recurs through the book. We didn't agree about the extent to which he had grown and changed through the experience of prison, or whether it was only that, once he was used to it, he was more comfortable in the controlled world of prison than he had been in the overstimulating outside world.

Apparently the author interviewed a few murderers before writing "This is How". It made a big impression on us and we agreed that it was a chillingly convincing window into the mind of a murderer, maybe especially chilling as the reader is able to understand and even like him, and almost come to share his view that it was merely a forgivable mistake.

Eva Hornung, Dogboy (or, is it Dog boy)

Image courtesy Text Publishing

Six Minervans met on the last night in May to discuss Eva Hornung's intriguing and sometimes confronting novel, Dogboy. We were a small group with some of our number gallivanting OS taking advantage of the northern summer.

Anyhow, back to Dogboy. In April we discussed Alan Gould's The lakewoman. It was shortlisted for last year's Prime Minister's Literary Awards - and we were impressed with it. Dogboy is the book that won. We all thought it was a pretty close call (not having discussed the other contenders). Some thought Hornung's book had the edge in tightness and originality, but we generally agreed that either would have been a worthy recipient. This is, in fact, the group's second Hornung novel. We read, a few years ago, her City of sealions which was published under her married name, Eva Sallis.

The discussion started with a brief report from one of our travelling members who said she'd enjoyed it, though she didn't expect to at the start. Another member was also not expecting to like it as she "hates dogs", but she too was impressed with the writing and originality of the story. 

The plot is pretty straightforward. It tells the story of Romochka who, at the beginning of the novel, is 4 years old and alone in an apartment in Moscow. He hasn’t seen his mother for a week or more and suddenly his uncle does not return. After a couple of days alone and sensing that the apartment building is being abandoned, he heads out and manages to get himself adopted by a dog, Mamochka, who lives with her four young puppies and two older offspring. The novel tells the story of his life with the dogs and of what happens when he, four years later, comes to the attention of humans, specifically two scientists/doctors working in a children’s rehabilitation centre.

The descriptions of life in the lair are pretty visceral: 

This [a rat] was, he decided, his favourite food. He chewed through the slippery ribcage to its soft centre, keeping its head in his fist to make sure Black Sister didn't crunch through it and eat his treasure.

If you don't like dogs (and even if you do), these and similar descriptions can be particularly confronting - but, the characters are so strongly drawn and the story so compelling that we all, regardless of our attitude to dogs, found we wanted to keep reading.

Our main questions, in the end, focused on the scientists - their characterisation, their role in the novel. Some felt they were more successfully realised and integrated into the novel than others. But, they do of course raise the central question: 

Would Romochka have been "better off living with dogs than with humans”?

The novel, then, teases out what it means to be human and, overall, humans (humanity) do not come out of it well, though of course there are humans who show love and care. Without Mamochka, however,  Romochka is unlikely to have survived and this is a sobering thing for us to consider.

It was an interesting discussion but that's about all I'll report. It's a month since we met and I can't put my hands on my notes. I'm sure I've misrepresented some of the tenor of the discussion and would love to be corrected by those who remember more or something different. Go on, you can do it!

Schedule for the second half of 2011

Our schedule for the second half of 2011 as decided at our May meeting is now listed under Current Schedule in the blog sidebar. Those of us who decided it hope the rest of you like it!

Please note that three members have not hosted this year. At the meeting we allocated the last two meetings to two of those members, but later heard that the third member had offered to host one meeting. So, I've decided to let you fight it out! Please look at October and November and let me know whether you're happy to do one of those and which one. I'll update the schedule when I hear from you.

Note: I have also updated the Schedule suggestions based on our discussions at the May meeting. Let me know if you have anything else to add, or change

Some schedule ideas for second half of 2011

I will add these to the Schedule Suggestions list in the sidebar but am adding them here with a little reasoning.

There are only three books on the Miles Franklin shortlist for this year and all look interesting for one reason or another:

• Kim Scott's That deadman dance. This book has been getting great reviews, and he's an indigenous writer who has won the award before. I'm very keen to read this.
• Roger McDonald's When colts ran. He's from around here, he provided advice to Alan Gould and he's won before. I'd like to read this too!
• Chris Womersley's Bereft. This has been getting great reviews too, and has already garnered some prizes. It's not his first novel but he is up and coming. Kate has read (or is reading) this in eBook version. Maybe if she can tear herself away from her river cruise she might comment here on whether she concurs with this for us to read.

But, what about some women writers? Cate Kennedy's The world beneath made a bit of splash last year. It's set in Tasmania. Or, a book by Gail Jones. I have yet to read her and would love to give her a go.

There are also some great books in those nice cheap Penguins, including books by Aussies Randolph Stow, Helen Garner, Robert Drewe.

Any other ideas?

Alan Gould, The Lake Woman

About 10 Minervans plus the author found somewhere to sit in my living room last night to discuss this, to quote Les Murray, "strange and compelling book". Appropriately for Anzac day reading, the book begins with the moment that an Australian soldier in British service parachutes into the chaos of D-Day Normandy. It was good to have Alan confirm that the book was intentionally set in, but not actually about the war. Also, as it has a most arresting first few sentences, we weren't surprised to hear that for him, a novel begins with a sentence. Luckily his was a more fruitful beginning than that of a character in Camus's "The Plague" who, we remembered, endlessly rewrote the first sentence of his novel but got no further.

Alan, who started out as a poet, explained that for him, poetry is like music while fiction is like history, and that he can only work in one mode or the other and not both at once. We were struck by the beauty of his prose throughout the book though, written as only a poet could write. We felt that it helped create the sense of unreality and dislocation that overtakes Alec, the main character, as his purpose is shaken after his rescue by a strange and unforgettable woman, in a way shifting his mind to a timeless, legendary dimension. His subsequent lack of focus caused distress to his loyal, practical sister who hated to see him fail in his promise. Alan confirmed that he had used clocks and watches as symbols of Alec's removal from time, and the different languages, French, English, German, including music ("doodling") as different channels of communication to create a sense of confusion between two dimensions. Cannon fire, the chaos of war and and the surreal devastation of the formerly peaceful Norman countryside heightened the sense of unreality.

We were struck by the authentic, period feel of the spoken interaction between the characters, particularly the military and the Australian country people. It was interesting to hear how Alan absorbed and adapted the experiences and expertise of the friends and acquaintances credited in the Acknowledgements section, and no-one was surprised to hear of hours spent examining various maps of Normandy.

Alan was queried about the role of coincidence in the novel, for example the constantly reappearing Sergeant Ferris. He explained that Ferris is the death figure, appearing when others die, but himself unkillable, and that for Alan as a novellist "coincidence makes a story other than bland, both at the level of history and at a plane outside natural causality". In response to another query he explained why he took us through the whole of Alec's life - so that, through the response of the students at his retirement, he could see that his life had had some value after all. Some of us were very moved by the last couple of paragraphs, which clarified something that had remained ambiguous through the whole story.

We also heard about the highs and lows of life as a poet-novellist, the impact of changing literary fashions and the sad reality that the marketing manager now decides what gets published.

I've left out such a lot that was covered in a wide ranging conversation that I really enjoyed. I also really loved the book, which I think is Alan's best so far, but as an old friend of his I'm rather biased. Did anyone disagree though when someone said "We should have the author here every time"?

Lloyd Jones, Hand me down world

Courtesy Text Publishing

All 8 (or so) Minervans who attended our meeting at the end of March to discuss Lloyd Jones' latest novel, Hand me down world, liked it. Some loved it, some liked it, but no-one disliked it. That says something about the quality of this book, methinks.

This is a multiple point of view novel chronicling the story of a young African woman who leaves Africa, by boat as an illegal immigrant, to find her son (who had been illegally taken from her when he was a baby) in Berlin. The first chapters of the book are presented as witness accounts by those who saw or helped her on her way. The rest of the book is told in larger chunks with, near the end, Ines (as we come to know her, though this is not her "real" name) telling us her (version of) her story. All these stories, except the Inspector's near the beginning, are told first person.

What Ines does to achieve her end is not - shall we say - always ethical. For her, the ends justifies the means in her desperation to make contact with her child. There's a death, and there's quite a bit of thieving and lying. For some Minervans this made her an unappealing character with whom they could not relate. For all of us, though, it certainly challenged us to think about what we might do - how far we might go - in similar circumstances. Another criticism of the novel was that it got a little bogged down in the central Berlin section ... did we need the full Defoe section some thought?

We discussed at some length the meaning of the title. Some ideas (including from reviews/interviews) included that:

• the world, our world, is a rather arbitrary one
• the son was, in a sense, "handed down"
• people inhabit different worlds
• Ines wore, symbolically, a hand-me-down coat, rather reflecting her status in the world as a "used" person because, for all her faults, she sure was "used"
• versions - of things, people - are a theme of the novel (just as, really, the world has different "versions" depending on who we are and where we live)

Jones, it appears from the two novels we've read of him, keenly interested in the marginalised and dispossessed. His views are perhaps most encompassed by Bernard (or Millennium Three), the French character who most supports Ines, no questions asked. He talks of his politicisation in Berlin:

...we abhorred the state-inspired delineations and definitions of difference. Borders. Citizenship. Rich. Poor. Entitlement.

Another witness, the Film Researcher, talks of "other":

Until then she was, black, African, other. But now I saw a young woman who looked about the same age as my sister Alison. I could have been looking at Ali, apart from the obvious differences. Now I knew what I must do.

How to meet and react to "Other" is a powerful challenge for us all ... and Jones, in this novel, tackles it head on ... it's a powerful tale.

And there I'll leave it. Our discussion was a month ago so I can't remember the finer detail. Minervans, if I've misrepresented us, here's your chance. Comment away!

Albert Camus, The plague ... Why did he write it?

Camus 1957 (Public domain, from the New York-World Telegram
 and Sun Newspaper Telegraph Newspaper Collection)

A lively discussion ensued when 8 Minervans met this week to discuss Albert Camus' The plague. There were those who loved it, those who were surprised by how easy it was to read, and those who wished he'd written something different. If he wanted to write about the Nazi occupation of France, one member cried, why didn't he? With a discussion opener like that, it was on for one and all (more or less).

For those who don't know what the book is about, here is a quick plot. It is set in the town of Oran, on the Algerian coast, in the late 1940s. The town is 'visited' by the plague, and so closes itself off for the duration of the disease. The novel then follows the progress of the disease and how the citizens cope with such a pestilence and the resultant "exile" and "separation". There is a narrator, who is not revealed until the end, but we see the story through the actions and conversations of several characters including Dr Rieux, Tarrou (a "strange" visitor to the town), and Rambert (a visiting journalist). Secondary characters include the Priest Paneloux, a minor government official Grand, and a man with a past Cottard.

That's the basis of the literal story ... but this is a book that can be read on other levels. It can also be seen as an allegory about the French occupation in World War 2 (with a member suggesting that he took this approach because the French may not have been comfortable with a direct exploration of the occupation), or more broadly as a metaphorical story about how to live in an "absurd" world. It is these allegorical/metaphorical levels which engaged some of us, but frustrated others. Regardless though of what we thought was (or should be) the intent of the book, we enjoyed talking about the characters and how they behaved and reacted:

• we thought about Tarrou's idea that we all have the plague in us. One member suggested that this idea is present in our 21st century consciousness - that is, that we are complicit in some way in the things that happen.
• we discussed Fr Paneloux and his reactions: first, his fire and brimstone speech that people's sins had brought God's wrath upon them; and then later, in response to the death of an innocent child, his argument that whatever God willed, we should will too, that "the Christian should yield himself wholly to the divine will". 
• we felt we could understand Rambert's initial determination to escape. After all, it wasn't his town.
• we admired Dr Rieux getting on with his duty.
• we wondered about Grand and his seemingly trivial obsession with the first sentence of his novel, but a member suggested that he might be the true hero of the novel, and quoted the narrator:

... if it is a fact that people like to have examples given them, men of the type they call heroic, and if it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a 'hero', the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal.

Grand in other words is a decent, ordinary everyman. No intellectualising for him, just a belief in doing the decent thing.

Of course, we discussed Cottard and his seemingly incomprehensibly happy reaction to the plague.

We enjoyed the language. One member commented that you could open the book anywhere and spot a beautifully written phrase. And this brought us to the translations. We all had Penguin editions, some old ones from the 1960s and 70s which used the 1948 Stuart Gilbert translation, and some the recent classic orange and white edition which uses the 2001 Robin Buss translation. We read the last paragraph in each translation and were surprised by the differences. For example, the "happy town" in 1948 becomes "contented" in 2001, the "linen-chests" of 1948 become "clothing", and "years and years" become "dozens of years". It felt very much like the language had been updated for more modern audience, but not being French experts we are not to say!

Finally, one member noted that an article she read described Camus as a "moraliste" but not a "moraliser", and that he had identified the central moral problems of the age. Many of us agreed with that, and felt that Camus was more humanist than existentialist.

I'm afraid, though, that the discussion was so vigorous that I have not recalled all that was said. I would be most happy if Minervans present picked me up in the comments on anything I've missed or, shock horror, anything that I've misrepresented! And, of course, for anyone else interested to chime in.