A LITTLE AREA

BOOKS with MEG MASON

At the end of 2018, I was on a book program, a live panel discussion with two doyennes of the publishing industry and me, a doyenne of my own kitchen; talking about our best books of the year.

Bookshop shelves had bowed under the weight of good Australian fiction that year so it made sense that the doyennes listed between them Boy Swallows Universe (Trent Dalton), The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (Holly Ringland), The Shepherd’s Hut (Tim Winton) and others. I was surprised that by the finish, neither had named a single international title, since it was also the year of Olivia Laing’s Crudo, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under and Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Rachel Cusk gave us Kudos, the last of her trilogy. Karl Ove Knausgaard concluded My Struggle and I concluded mine with his. And then, of course there was Sally Rooney’s Normal People which threw critics into such paroxysms of delight, we all felt duty-bound to read it, even those of us with legally recognised relationships and jobs and thus not her target demographic.

They were all on my list, as well as the Patrick Melrose trilogy (Edward St Aubyn) which, not new, was new to me and I was fizzing to talk about it. So finally, the moderator said, and now, Meg, what were your favourite Australian books of the year?

No doubt it had said so in the email invitation which, even less doubt, I would have read on my phone, at traffic lights or the fish counter, intending to come back to it later, forgetting to, and thus, missing the key word, ‘Australian’.

The studio lights seemed to get so much hotter in the seconds I spent trying to come up with one, then trying to think of a way to say without saying that I hadn’t read a single Australian book that year, nor could I recall an Australian title I had read ever, because I don’t really go in for local fiction.

My defence is flimsy, although twopronged. First prong, much of Australian fiction deals with landscape, but I grew up in New Zealand. The landscape in my bones is mountains and kauri forests and dark green rivers. When I first moved here, before I got my eye in, the Australian landscape just seemed brown, and hot. I see the beauty of it now, but there still isn’t a sense of deep recognition, the feeling of home, which I feel as though I need in a book to love it.

Second prong, I didn’t read when I was young so I never did the Alibrandis and Alison Ashleys, which are surely preparatory texts for future enjoyment of the Moriartys. When I finally came to reading, I had all the classics to get through and once I’d done

Dickens et al, I glanced right past Australian fiction, 1900 to present, in the rush to get to Woolf and Waugh, and onwards to Muriel Spark, Dodie Smith and the Barbaras, both Pym and Trapido.

Still, on the way home from the panel and out of shame—as an adult woman, the single motivating force behind all my actions and decisions—I vowed to read the Australian canon. Happily, after googling ‘the Australian canon’, I realised I have read, and deeply loved, a lot of homespun novels already. They’re just old, or slight.

These forgotten volumes might already be on your shelves, wedged between a pair of Peter Careys and, if so, they deserve to be taken down and dusted off. If they are not, they might fit well in the space made when you Lifeline-book-fair all your Bryce Courtenays.

I thought I would write about one here: Jessica Andersons’s Tirra Lirra by the River (Macmillan, 1978; this edition is published by Picador, 1997). It’s a slender volume—to paraphrase Nancy Mitford, a perfect little cutlet of a book—about a woman escaping a dreary marriage, as all the best novels are; in this case, to a man who is sanctimonious and mean and called Colin.

Nora leaves him, and Sydney, for London where she becomes a dressmaker, rents rooms in crumbling Georgian terraces, falls in with racy people and says things like, ‘all the same, unless I have a warm bath very soon, and I lie down, something regrettable is bound to happen.’

What won me to her and the book, utterly by page 19, is her explaining: ‘In whatever circumstances I have found myself, I have always managed to devise a little area, camp or covert, that was not too ugly. At times it was a whole room, but at others it may have been only a corner with a handsome chair, or a table and a vase of flowers. Once, it was a bed, a window, and a lemon tree. But always, I have managed to devise it somehow, and no doubt I shall do it again.’

Reading the entire Australian canon is far too lofty a goal, I have decided. But I hope, here, I can devise a little area, for books— chiefly Australian—that will nourish, cheer, or draw the eye away from a grim backdrop we can’t do anything about.

It might lead me on to the heftier volumes. But, as Nora says at a point vis. how much housework she is willing to do, for now, ‘this is absolutely as far as I intend to go’. n