Jane Rawson's Blog, page 8

Nearing the end of my enforced reading…

Image by Paul Falardeau/Flickr

Last year I signed up to do #TBR20, a challenge where you agree to read 20 books you already own before borrowing or buying anything new. I’ve been awful at it, just awful – once I finish my pile of 20 I’ll let you in on all the other books I’ve read since I started #1. But right now I’m reading Italo Calvino’s��If on a winter’s night a traveller, which I bought (according to the sticker on the back) and started reading in 2006. I gave up about one-fifth of the way in that time. This time I’m really enjoying it. It has a great deal to say about reading, and – you might have noticed – I’m a bit obsessed with reading at the moment (watch this space as in about a month from now I start pressuring you to join my fundraising readathon). But even this read has been a cheat – Calvino was not on my initial #TBR20 list, but as the pile got down to the last three books I finally admitted to myself there’s no way I’m going to read two of them right now. So the switch was made.��Cities are good for you and��Maren Gripe are (temporarily) off the to-read list, with Calvino and Ellen van Neerven’s��Heat & Light�� subbing in – at least both were books I already owned.

Anyway, I’m writing this because I wanted to share a little bit of��If on a winter’s night… which is pretty relevant to the whole #TBR20 contraption. It goes a little something like this:

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that��If on a winter’s night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages
the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success
the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment*
the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

(Calvino continues on, but I shall stop here so as not to a. bore you or b. break copyright law.)

*These are the ones I really struggle with at the moment. I’m not at all sure what I’m doing with the book I’m currently writing, and I keep hoping that if I just read this thing or that thing that it will help me find the right voice or the right idea or the right structure… but of course it won’t. Still, it made me read this Calvino, and re-read Slaughterhouse V, and a whole bunch of other books I’ve really enjoyed. I should get on with writing…

Get your hands on Overland

A short break for self-promotion: I have a story in the brand new issue of Overland. I’m very proud of this story. If you’d like to read it (there’s also a new story from Wayne Macauley, in case you need another incentive) you can get a single issue or subscribe at the Overland online shop. It’s worth it for the Lily Mae Martin illustrations alone.

Should we hope? And also, ‘Life & Fate’

Image by Shandi-lee Cox/Flickr

I might have mentioned that I’ve been working, with a co-author called James Whitmore, on a personal handbook to help people survive climate change. It’s with the publisher now and should be out later this year.

Last night I was part of a panel with Alice Robinson and James Bradley, along with moderator Tony Birch, discussing��climate change as the new dystopia. Talking about climate change is hard. I really, really believe everyone needs to personally care about it, but I’m also very aware that nagging them to do so is completely pointless. I feel a huge responsibility to openly and honestly say what I believe to be true – that the world is in terrible trouble, that anything we do now can only reduce and not stop climate change – but I’m also overwhelmed by the pointlessness of doing so, and by my embarrassment at expressing strong feelings. So mostly I say a couple of little things then cover up the discomfort with jokes.

Our book is about what individuals and small groups of people can do to live with and survive the extreme weather, food shortages, social disruptions and despair that come with climate change. It’s about personal adaptation. Some people hate the idea of talking about adaptation – they think it’s giving up. I reckon it’s part of living as though we believe climate change is real. I think it’s part of the package of harassing politicians to do something about emissions, getting your own money out of fossil fuels, holding the media to account and all the rest of trying to reduce the nastiness of climate change. We have to do all of it because we’re now stuck with at least 2 degrees of warming and probably a fair bit more, and because no one seems to be doing anything much to protect us from the effects that will bring.

Does accepting that we need to prepare ourselves for climate change mean I’ve given up hope? I don’t even know. Sometimes I feel cheeriest when I think about how the world had had five major extinction events in its history, and after each of them life has eventually bounced back in a wild tumult of diversity. That’ll probably happen again. We might go. Tigers, elephants and just about every other species you’ve ever had a crush on (unless you’re a huge algae fan) definitely will. And then new things will come along. Elizabeth Kolbert’s book,��The Sixth Extinction, is very good on this.

On the other hand, I feel pretty hopeless when I try to think of any scenario in which Australia might seriously do the things that are required to significantly reduce our emissions. Neither of the major parties want to do it, no one in big business wants to do it, and between them they seemed to have convinced the rest of the country we don’t want to do it either. Even if we did, we’re signing up to things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which are taking away our power to do anything about it.

There are many studies on how hope or despair about climate change affects the way we act. Clive Hamilton has researched this topic and found we come up with the best strategies when we feel everything there is to feel about climate change, including despair and hope.

I am reading the 15th book of my TBR20 challenge: Vasily Grossman’s��Life and fate. Set in the siege of Stalingrad in World War 2, Grossman’s epic is about the ideologies that take over our life, the ‘isms’. He is most concerned with Fascism and Communism, with the total violence of the totalitarian state and with our willingness to submit to it in the name of our beliefs. And this is what he has to say about hope:

A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed. The optimism of people standing on the edge of the grave is astounding. The soil of hope – a hope that was senseless and sometimes dishonest and despicable – gave birth to a pathetic obedience that was often equally despicable.

The Warsaw Rising, the uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor, the various mutinies of��brenners, were all born of hopelessness. But then utter hopelessness engenders not only resistance and uprisings but also a yearning to be executed as quickly as possible.

People argued over their place in the queue beside the blood-filled ditch while a mad, almost exultant voice shouted out: ‘Don’t be afraid, Jews. It’s nothing terrible. Five minutes and it will all be over.’

Everything gave rise to obedience – both hope and hopelessness.

No one takes reading seriously

Image by Alexandre Dulaunoy/flickr

This week I asked my boss if I could start working four days instead of five, to give me a day for writing, and he very kindly said yes. It seemed a sensible thing to do: I like writing, after all, and consider myself a writer. That’s worth taking a 20% cut to the family budget, right? I do think it is, but considering I never expect to actually make a career of or any money from writing novels, it is kind of a weird thing to do. How come it’s OK to take a day a week off to write, but so much less so to take a day a week off to read? I love reading. I’m heaps better at reading than I am at writing. I have about exactly as much chance of ever making money from it as I do from writing. But it would seem pretty outrageous��to tell my husband ‘hey I’ve cut back my work hours so I can spend a day a week re-reading Gilead and Perdido St Station and maybe a couple of those new novels everyone keeps talking about’. Tempting though. Maybe I’ll go down to three days a week…

Dabbling in sci-fi: should it be a crime?

Writer-wise, I am a speculative fiction dilettante. I do not have any deep understanding of the form, I have read only around the fringes (Mieville but not Asimov; Mitchell but not Le Guin), I don’t know enough about the tropes and styles to properly respect them. My own writing might be glorified by calling it slipstream, but really it’s just dabbling.

Some proper sci-fi writers reckon that kind of behaviour is rubbish. They would rather you’d at least subscribed to Aurealis Magazine and read the classics before giving it a go yourself. If you don’t, you’re likely to write something which you either think is frightfully clever but has actually been written a billion times before, or you’ll just do a half-arsed job. And I have, in public, dismissed that attitude out of hand. My usual argument is it’s OK if you don’t know your sci-fi, as long as your readers don’t know their sci-fi either.

The most popular form of sci-fi dabbling is some kind of time travel – I faff around with it in A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists; you may also have heard of a little book called The Time Traveller’s Wife or read The Shining Girls or maybe even The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells. Dystopia is huge too, in the dabbler community. Less common, though, is the mainstay of classic sci-fi, human goes to an alien planet. Until Michel Faber came along, that is.

I’ve just finished reading��The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber. This book has had loads of column inches, perhaps not least because the author declared it would be his last novel, and because his wife died just as he was finishing his final draft.

The critical reaction to��The Book of Strange New Things goes a long way to proving my argument that you can massacre sci-fi tropes as much as you want so long as you don’t aim your book at sci-fi readers. But it also makes me want to say, “you can, but please��don’t“.

Faber’s book is essentially a story about the breakdown of a loving marriage as two people’s lives go their separate way: hers, into a collapse of everything she takes for granted as Britain slides into dystopia; his, on a mission��evangelising to aliens on a far-away planet. The ‘is it still love?’ story is pretty strong. Faber has a lot to say about how much love relies on shared experience and context, and how quickly something that seems utterly solid can become crumbly and unfamiliar, and I think he does it convincingly.

The sci-fi aspects are not handled nearly as well. World-building is a big part of sci-fi. I have a low tolerance for it, as a writer and a reader, and I can’t imagine I’d ever set something in an utterly alien place where everything had to be thought up��and then described (mainly because I can’t bear reading long descriptions of physical things). Faber gets around this by just not bothering. Oasis, the alien planet, is flat and mainly dirt. Its notable feature is that the rain falls in some interesting ways and the air is quite viscous. There is one vegetable species, one insect species, one mammal/bird species, and one humanesque species. As far as we know nothing else lives on Oasis, there are no geographical features and not much in the way of weather. I don’t ask for much from my alien settings. I don’t want Tolkienesque mapping and linguistics. But even I baulk at an ecosystem with only four��species – how does evolution even work in that kind of set-up? Can there not at least be a throwaway explanation of what’s going on? (In an interview with Ramona Koval, Faber says ‘I think that if there���s anything that sets this book apart from science fiction, if you like, it���s that I���m completely uninterested in the how of it’.)

There are all kinds of allusions to mysteries, probably sinister, which are hinted at then never really explored. Settlers on this new planet are hand picked for their lack of passion and their absence of connections to earth. Bing Crosby plays over the PA most of the time. There are old art posters on the walls and a mess hall stocked with lifestyle magazines with any references to current affairs torn out. No one is to know what’s happening on Earth (except our protagonist, who knows all about it and is free to talk to anyone who’ll listen). There is a nurse who may be some kind of proto human, or maybe not. There is the previous��missionary, gone native, whose name is so much like Conrad’s Kurtz that really can it refer to anything else (it does)? But in the end not much comes of any of it – all the usual tropes of conspiracy and giant bad corporations are pumped up, then left to deflate somewhere in a back room.

Meanwhile, on Earth, disaster rockets around the planet, wiping out countries and economies and supermarkets and hospitals in a matter of months, destroying the life of the wife character and further alienating her from her far-off, un-understanding missionary husband. I mean, it could happen, this series of concerted and sudden disasters. But a more elegantly thought-out��apocalypse would have made the whole thing more compelling.

So what’s my point? I guess my point is, if you want to write a love story, and you want to write a story which makes us grateful for our resilient human bodies (a point Faber has raised in many interviews), why put it in a science fiction setting when you so clearly don’t care about science fiction? Why not just have it on earth, in the present day? It feels as though he wrote a story and then worried it needed jazzing up a bit with some aliens and an apocalypse (a crime I myself have certainly been guilty of). But perhaps the biggest moral lesson is that it serves me right for reading a book that comes with a recommendation from Yann Martel.

#TBR20 update

I’ve finished��The Book of Strange New Things, which you’ve probably already noticed, and started on��Best Australian Stories 2014. I took This changes everything by Naomi Klein off the pile, because after 18 months writing a survival guide to climate change I need a little break; I replaced it with��Clade, a climate change novel by James Bradley, because I am an idiot.��While I was away at Varuna I read about a thousand books that weren’t on my list and that was very bad but I had a lovely time.

This excerpt from a funny little article in Ploughshares goes some way to explaining how on earth my TBR pile got so out of hand…

Book #1: If you���re meeting all these amazing fellow writers at conferences and festivals, you owe it to them to read their books. It will be so awkward if you meet again in six months and you haven���t read their novels yet!

Book #2: The Guilt Pile beside your bed is going to grow taller and taller until the day you die. It will, in fact, be what kills you.

At least��that pile is now 11 books smaller…

Want to write? Go to Varuna

Last year I won a fellowship – the Mick Dark Flagship Fellowship for environmental writing – which awarded me three weeks at Varuna, The Writers House. I was delighted to win, but mostly because it made me feel better about the project I was working on: I’d been worried it was a bit rubbish, and also that I wouldn’t finish it by the time the publisher wanted it. It was nice to be validated and given a little extra time to hit that deadline. But I was also a bit scared: about being away from home and my husband for three weeks (I’m not very good at that kind of thing), about spending enforced socialising time with other writers (also not very good at that kind of thing) and about bushfires.

Going to Varuna has to be one of the top five things that has happened to me. I finished my manuscript,��which was a huge relief. I even felt like some of it was pretty good. I enjoyed meeting and spending time with other writer types, though yes sometimes I did feel awkward and uncomfortable and wished I could spend the evenings with someone I already knew, like my husband. It rained almost every day and never got hotter than 28 degrees, so bushfires weren’t really an issue.

But the main thing was the incredible joy of being able to write. All day, every day, all I had to do was write. Sure, I went for strolls in the bush. I did a little op-shopping. I made more than one trip to the Station Bar because they had this incredible Four Pines Saison on tap which I’ve never seen anywhere else. But mostly I wrote, or thought about writing. And I could not have been happier. I was incredibly productive. And in a way I really never have before, I felt fully myself.��

I am very lucky. I have a good job with an organisation whose values��I support and a boss who doesn’t expect me to do work outside work hours. I don’t have kids (lucky? Unlucky? You decide. But it does give me more writing time). My husband values my writing and is hugely intellectually and emotionally supportive of it. I can’t imagine how difficult it is for those who have demanding families, who have to work long hours, who have friends and family who can’t see the point of being a writer.

But even with the good luck of my circumstances, there just isn’t enough time or peace (mostly peace) to really sink into writing. So thank you to Varuna – and to the other writers I met while I was there – for such a brilliant eye-opening, consciousness-awakening retreat from the world. I recommend it so highly to anyone who longs to write. Apply for a fellowship and if you don’t get one, save up and pay for a visit instead. It will do you more good than pretty much any other holiday you can imagine.

Readers, if you want to help a writer, support them to go to Varuna, or support Varuna itself - there is nothing else like it in Australia.

There are some pictures here of my time at Varuna.

Viva la Novella

Just a quick post to nervously gloat that my unpublished novella,��Formaldehyde, has been shortlisted for Seizure’s Viva la Novella prize. Six of us are on the list, three of us get our novellas published. Last years’ winners were bloody gorgeous (you can see them here��and honestly you might as well buy one or four while you’re there) so I’m pretty excited.

It’s a great initiative – because, seriously, it’s not easy to get a novella published – so if you have a long-short or short-long story hanging around, get to work making it good before entries open for Viva la Novella 4.

Politics in literature: N by John A Scott

I’ve been meaning to stop reviewing on Goodreads and start reviewing over here instead (if you can call it reviewing: I never write more than a few paragraphs), so here’s my first attempt.

N by John A Scott is an Australian novel, released last year and since shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (announced on Wednesday). It’s also part of my #TBR20 reading list. Speaking of which, that’s all about to go out the window: I’m currently at Varuna working on a book and they have so many books here I’ve been wanting to read. So let me off the hook while I get through Margo Lanagan’s��Black Juice, Nicole Smith’s��Sideshow, Alison Croggon’s��Navigatio and Emma Donoghue’s��Frog Music (and if I still have time, Shirley Jackson’s��The Haunting of Hill House). And so, to��N.

I’ll be surprised if I read a new release I like better this year. N is an extraordinary, ambitious and very long effort (600 pages plus, in tincy print). The story opens at a Cabinet meeting: ministers are debating what to do with a boat-load of refugee children in an unseaworthy vessel, moored off Fremantle. For political expediency they decide to send it back out to sea to sink.

It’s 1941, and Australia is about to become a fascist police state sharing its land and power with the invading Japanese army. Artists, intellectuals and Aboriginal people are sent to internment camps; the Australian people become suspicious of independent thought; torture of dissidents and suppression of free media become common-place.

The novel follows many different characters – an artist’s wife whose world has fallen apart, a public servant unwittingly administering the rise of fascism, a playwright who has begun to see visions, a war artist, a guerrilla Australian solider, a ghost writer with far-right dreams of immortality. There is a love story, a mystery story, strange and fantastical happenings, brilliant rewritings of Australian history and myth (including a restaging of the invasion of Gallipoli held at the MCG which pleasingly mirrored something I wrote in my own novel) and, in the end, a plea for us to take a bloody hard look at ourselves and the kind of country we’re creating.

Maybe it was because I’d just read this article about the treatment of asylum seekers, but at the end of N I burst into tears. What terrible things we are blithely allowing to happen.

I thought this review from the Saturday Paper was very interesting: the reviewer found the book unmoving, and compared it unfavourably to��The Narrow Road to the Deep North. As I was reading��N and being horrified and moved by eerie similarities to modern Australia, I thought “god I wish The Narrow Road to the Deep North had been more like this” (though i do agree some of Scott’s characters were pretty caricaturey, and I could have done without the heavy-handed afterword, but anyway). Keep in mind I think Gravity’s Rainbow��and��Infinite Jest are among the best books ever written, and that I love books such as Cold Light which are written from a bureaucrat’s perspective,��and make of that what you will.

Here’s another much more in-depth review from The Sydney Review of Books.

So how’s that #TBR20 thing going, anyway?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

Image by Kat NLM/Flickr

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, this year I’m trying to knock over some of my to-read pile by not buying or borrowing any more books until I’ve read 20��books��I already own. I’ve failed: Harry Saddler was kind enough to send me a copy of his novel��Small Moments, now sadly out of print. I justified reading it immediately even though it’s not on my list because it’s about the Canberra bushfires and I’m writing a book about living through and recovering from natural disasters. (He also sent me his non-fiction��Not Birdwatching which I am dying to read, but am holding off.) I also snuck in a quick read of Jenny Valentish’s��Cherry Bomb before giving it to a friend for Christmas.

Of the books I’m supposed to be reading, I’ve now finished six:

Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse, which I blogged about already
Suddenly a knock on the door by Etgar Keret
Slow water by Annamarie Jagose
A mercy by Toni Morrison
Falling by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Demons by Wayne Macauley

I started��Ablutions by Patrick de Witt but I wasn’t feeling robust enough to deal with its very dark (and funny) story of a bartender and his clients destroying their lives. And I’m now reading��Lost and Found by Brooke Davis and��The weight of a human heart by Ryan O’Neill, which I am rationing out to myself in teaspoons.

Part of the reason I wanted to do this exercise was the hope that I would just stumble across great books largely accidentally. Lately so much of my reading has been driven by things I��must read, either for research or because everyone else is talking about them and I think they’re somehow going to change my life. I wanted to discover an unheralded joy. Etgar Keret (widely heralded, but not in earshot of me) has been just such a discovery. What funny, bleak, real, surreal short stories this bloke writes. I don’t even know where I got this book from or how long it’s been sitting on my bookshelf. So thanks, #TBR20, for making me finally get around to reading it. (A mercy��was pretty damn great too.)

Cold Light, Canberra and my first #TBR20

A little while ago I signed up for #TBR20, vowing to read 20 books I already owned before buying or reading more. I’ve already failed: I accidentally got Harry Sadler to send me a copy of his novel Small moments, and I can just tell I’m going to buy The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson after reading an incredible story of hers published in the current Canary Press magazine.

But anyway… I’m partway through two of my TBR20 books – Suddenly a knock on the door by Etgar Keret, and Slow Water by Annamarie Jagose – and I’ve finished Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse. I don’t plan to review all the books I read, but I did want to publish this extract from Cold Light. The book’s hero, Edith Campbell Berry, attends the opening of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra in 1964, having fought for many years for the lake’s existence. She thinks on Canberra’s future and the vision she has sounds like my perfect city. It isn’t all that much like the Canberra I grew up in, and I wish ECB could be Australia’s Prime Minister now…

Weetangera’s “shopping square surrounded by a park … meeting hall and tavern for drinking coffee or a bottle of wine with nuts at the end of the day”.

Some of her dreams for Canberra had come right, and the rest would come right in time. Fingers crossed. All children could walk safely to school on their own, or ride a bike or a horse. On waking, everyone would see the sky and the sun when they looked out their window and would never live in the shadow of tall buildings. Toilets would be indoors and separated from the bathroom. The houses would not have front fences but become part of the street park, and all neighbours and passing people would say hello as you hosed the front garden – maybe low hedges could be allowed. Paths to the front door would curve; would not be a dull straight line from street to door. The back garden would be for the privacy of the householders to do as they pleased. People would be encouraged to eat out more, instead of each family eating alone every night hunched over a quarrelsome table. In the local cafes, people would come to know each other and draw up their chairs and chat about things that mattered.

PM Menzies ‘opening’ Lake Burley Griffin

Every neighbourhood would have a shopping square surrounded by a park, and would have a meeting hall and a tavern for drinking coffee or a bottle of wine with nuts at the end of the day. There would be public squares – piazzas – where young people could be diverted from ‘the mischievousness and folly natural to their age, and under handsome porticos may spend the heat of the day and be mutually serviceable to one and another’, as the Italian Leon Battista Alberti urged in the 1400s. She had read this out to Gibson and anyone who would listen at the Congress.

Animals and children would be everywhere and allowed into cafes.

Everyone would be in a permanent conversation about the Canberra dream, including those who did not live in Canberra. Canberra was the only city in Australia that was everyone’s business. Already, everyone had an opinion about it. Through argument, everyone would help make it.

And people would travel to work together, swiftly and colourfully and cheerfully, in the smart trams and buses of the city – the best in the world. And on the brightly painted buses and tram cars, on some days, there would be a surprise – a famous person shaking hands; a renowned singer singing; a champion sportsman signing autographs – and there would be poetry and jokes on placards in the cars, and roving musicians.

And the lake ferries would be the same – gaily painted and be-flagged on special occasions – taking people to and from work from lakeside ports. The lake would echo with music played by roving musicians or the employees themselves on their way home in the evenings- accordions, flutes, recorders, guitars. Not too loudly. And not tin whistles; she had no fondness for the tin whistle.

Vale Edith Campbell Berry and your dream of a better Australia.