Tag: Australia

Book review: Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

Monkey Grip book cover

Tim is a fan of Helen Garner and has been telling me to read her for ages so I finally gave her a chance. As I should have known, I completely agree that she is excellent.

I didn’t want to start in the same place Tim did. Garner’s most famous book is This House of Grief, a true crime story about the murder of three children. It is apparently stunningly well written but I don’t think I will ever feel able to read that.

Monkey Grip was her first novel, based on her own life in Melbourne in the 1970s. The degree to which it is or is not fictionalized has caused Garner some negative press over the decades since its publication. But as she points out in this essay, even if she did just edit her own diaries and change all the names – she wrote those diaries in the first place. This is still original writing by her. And it really is original.

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The silence that anaesthetises shame

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The Light Between Oceans
by M L Stedman

This is a beautifully written account of people facing terrible circumstances and decisions. It didn’t move me the way I thought it would (or should) but it got me thinking about love, in all its forms. I can see why this debut novel has already attracted a lot of interest.

The story is set in Western Australia in the 1920s, primarily on a tiny island far off the coast occupied only by the lighthouse keeper and his family. After serving in World War I, Tom is looking for a quiet, useful life when he signs up to “the lights”. He expects to live out his days alone and has accepted that when, on shore leave in the small town of Partageuse, he meets Isabel. She is young, sparkling, headstrong and quick to fall in love.

Izzy has to persuade Tom that she can deal with the life on the island. Shore leave is every three years, with the only other contact with people being a quarterly supply boat. In emergencies a signal can be sent out but otherwise they are quite alone with the lighthouse, cottage, vegetable patch, chickens and goats, at the forefront of every weather front and surrounded by the tempestuous meeting point of two oceans. It is a tough life but Izzy seems up to the task.

The novel begins with the pivotal event before going back to fill in all these details. One day a boat washes up on the island containing a dead body and a crying baby. Izzy has just lost her third child in stillbirth and is out of her mind with grief. The baby appears like a gift from God. But they can’t possibly keep it and not report it, can they?

The story explores grief, truth, lies and choices, sometimes slightly too obviously but at other times very effectively: “History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame.”

It’s a hugely emotional story quietly told. I actually thought it was written by a man until I read Stedman’s bio because it is largely viewed from Tom’s perspective. He is stoic, dependable and brave – essentially a good man – where Izzy is impetuous, subject to mood swings and bears grudges. Perhaps this perspective prevented the story from becoming melodramatic or schmaltzy, which is some achievement considering the subject matter, but it also distanced me enough from events that I was not moved by things that I think should have moved me. I should have cried reading this story, or at least come close, but I did not. In fact at times I found it too slow, though it picked up a lot in the third act.

The characters are very well created and I was eager to know what would happen to them. I liked how Tom turned to his duty, becoming more efficient, more clean and tidy, when life got hard. But the best part was the setting. The descriptions of the sea and the weather are stunning: “There are times when the ocean is not the ocean – not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger”. Beautiful.

This book was sent to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.

Published 26 April 2012 by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Books.

Prepare for tears

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Red Dog
by Louis de Bernières

This is the sweetest most wonderful book I have read in some time. I think it’s sort-of aimed at children, at least I hope it is else I will have to have criticisms about some of the slightly condescending explanations and I don’t want to criticise such a lovely lovely book.

The best summary of this book is the one supplied by the author himself:

“In early 1998 I went to Perth in Western Australia in order to attend the literature festival, and part of the arrangement was that I should go to Karratha to do their first ever literary dinner. Karratha is a mining town a long way further north. The landscape is extraordinary, being composed of vast heaps of dark red earth and rock poking out of the never-ending bush. I imagine that Mars must have a similar feel to it. I went exploring and discovered the bronze statue to Red Dog outside the town of Dampier. I felt straight away that I had to find out more about this splendid dog. A few months later I returned to Western Australia and spent two glorious weeks driving around collecting Red Dog stories and visiting the places that he knew, writing up the text as I went along. I hope my cat never finds out that I have written a story to celebrate the life of a dog.”

Red Dog was a Red Cloud kelpie, which is an Australian breed of sheepdog, and lived in the 1970s in and around Dampier, at that time mostly a mining town. De Bernières has lightly fictionalised his account but based it on those stories he collected and it does read like a collected folklore, though there is nothing unbelievable or magical about it. Red Dog was simply a dog who refused to be tied to one owner but somehow became everyone’s dog. As dogs go he had some quirky habits and he wasn’t above stealing his dinner but he was affectionate and loyal to those he befriended and in return most everyone he met considered him a friend. People would take it in turn to de-flea him or take him to the vet for shots and he would sit by their sick children’s bedsides or guide caravan-dwellers to the toilet block at night.

This is such a simple story but de Bernières tells it beautifully, describing the landscape and the weather and using the local dialect just enough to give a real flavour of the time and place. The book is illustrated by Alan Baker with basic but effective line drawings in red and black and they add a fairy-tale quality to the experience.

The only negative, and I really hesitate to say it, is that de Bernières does over-explain some details. It adds to the condescension that at the back of the book there is a “Glossary of Australianisms” which I didn’t find at all necessary, seeing as the few words I didn’t know were made completely clear by context. But as I said above, if this is intended as a children’s book I can forgive all of that.

I really would recommend that everyone read this heartwarming book but doglovers beware, you will need to have tissues handy – it’s the life story of a dog, how do you think it’s going to end?

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Secker & Warburg.