Faber Forever
I first opened Toby Faber’s Faber and Faber: The Untold Story thinking, as a bookseller, that I’d find an interesting insight into how publishing really works, through a history of one of the truly iconic publishers. I did, but I found so much more—a delightful treasure trove. Toby tells the story of the firm his grandfather Geoffrey founded in 1924 through a chronological series of extracts from letters, diaries, memoranda, with his own commendably spare comments providing the links. What a history it is. Of course there’s the poetry: Virginia Woolf never forgave Faber for stealing T S Eliot from Hogarth—by offering him job security. Early on we have Faber’s letter to Eliot, thanking him for the offer to publish The Waste Land: ‘You won’t think it unkind of me to say that I am excitedly groping in it. You are obscure, you know’. And Eliot turned out be an amazing talent-spotter—Auden, Spender, Pound, Finnegan’s Wake. A heritage continued by the legendary Charles Monteith later in the century with Hughes, Plath, Larkin, Heaney and the list goes on. Add the phenomenal Faber play list, music publishing, and a growing list of fiction (also later in the century) which included P D James, Carey, Ishiguro, Kundera, Vargas Llosa, and you’ve an idea of how high in the pantheon of literary publishers Faber ranked. Yet the pleasure and fascination in the book comes, unexpectedly, in the quality of the writing—whether in the candour or delicacy of the correspondence between publisher and author, or in readers’ reports, or in internal dealings within the company. Threaded throughout is the sense of the precarious financial state of independent publishing. Originally ‘The Scientific Press’, publishing mainly journals and books for nurses, funded its literary forays, and the sale of that arm, as well as the Faber family trust, bankrolled its early decades (there was only one Faber, actually, but Walter De La Mere suggested that Faber and Faber was better, ‘because you can’t have too much of a good thing’). It’s conceivable that, other tribulations and triumphs aside, the house could have failed to see the 20th Century out, bar the fabulous good fortune of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. The astonishing success of of the musical based on T S Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats meant a river of gold in royalties to Faber and the Eliot estate. And who remembers Derek Llewellyn Jones’ Everywoman or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency? Both (seemingly unlikely) publications of Faber, that paid the rent through the 1980s. But most of all, through the sheer excellence of the letter writing, we have the joy of anecdote, and recognition of the serendipity of it all. To choose but a couple: a senior publisher grabbed from the reject slush pile a first novel about which the initial reader was scathing (‘an absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the colonies. A group of children land in jungle country. Rubbish). Golding was lucky that Lord of the Flies made it. They rejected Animal Farm as too risky. And there’s a delightful apology to the Traveller’s Club for having brought the poet Thom Gunn to lunch (he wore a fringed leather jacket and cowboy boots, and the letter reminds you just how much a Gentlemen’s Club the whole industry was). If that’s not enough to whet the appetite, this is, unsurprisingly, a beautiful book to hold, to look at, and to own—Jacket design, endpapers, typeface, photographs, and binding. Faber lives on, ninety this year, and we’re the winners. David Gaunt
Ghosts of the Past by Tony Park ($33, PB)
Africa, 1906: A young Australian adventurer is condemned to death. Sydney, the present: journalist Nick Eatwell has just lost his job, enter South African journo Susan Vidler chasing information about Nick’s great-great uncle, Cyril Blake, who fought in the Anglo-Boer War & later joined the struggle for independence across the border in the German colony of South West Africa, now Namibia. In Germany, historian Anja Berghoff is researching the origins of the famed desert horses of Namibia. She’s also interested in Blake and an Irish-German firebrand & spy, Claire Martin, with whom Cyril had an affair. Nick & Anja head to Africa on the trail of a legend, but someone else is delving into the past, looking for clues to the secret location of a missing horde of gold that’s worth killing for.
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Now in B Format Taboo by Kim Scott, $23 Two Old Men Dying by Tom Keneally, $20 Preservation by Jock Serong, $23
Australian Literature The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle by Sophie Green ($30, PB)
It’s 1982 in Australia. In a seaside suburb, housewife Theresa takes up swimming. She wants to get fit; she also wants a few precious minutes to herself. So at sunrise each day she strikes out past the waves. From the same beach, the widowed Marie swims. With her husband gone, bathing is the one constant in her new life. After finding herself in a desperate situation, 25-year-old Leanne only has herself to rely on. She became a nurse to help others, even as she resists help herself. Elaine has recently moved from England. Far from home & without her adult sons, her closest friend is a gin bottle. In the waters of Shelly Bay, these four women find each other. They will survive bluebottle stings & heartbreak, find companionship, and learn that love takes many forms.
The Pillars by Peter Polites ($33, PB)
Don’t worry about the housing bubble, she would say. Don’t worry about the fact that you will never be able to afford a home. Worry about the day after. That’s when they will all come, with their black shirts and bayonets, and then you will see the drowned bodies and slit necks. And I would stand there and say, But Mum, why are you telling me this when I’m ten years old. Working as a writer hasn’t granted Pano the financial success he once imagined, but lobbying against a mosque being built across the road from his home (and the occasional meth-fuelled orgy) helps to pass the time. He’s also found himself a gig ghostwriting for a wealthy property developer. The pay cheque alone is enough for him to turn a blind eye to some dodgy dealings —at least for the time being. In a world full of flashy consumerism and aspiration, can Pano really escape his lot in life? And does he really want to?
Near and the Far V 2: More stories from the Asia-Pacific region (eds) Carlin & Rendle-Short A vibrant collection of stories that features writers who have forged connections across cultures and generations, with contributors from Australia, Papua New Guinea, South Korea, Vietnam & China, among others. ($30, PB)
The Burnt Country by Joy Rhoades ($33, PB)
Australia 1948. Kate Dowd is running Amiens, a sizeable sheep station in NSW, against many odds. Her grazier neighbour is attacking her method of burning off to repel a bushfire. Her farm is the only protection she can offer her half-sister Pearl, as the Aborigines Welfare Board threatens to take her away. Ostracised by the local community for even acknowledging Pearl, Kate cannot risk another scandal. Which means turning her back on her wartime lover, Luca Canali. When ex-husband Jack threatens to extort her she finds herself putting out fires on all fronts to save her farm, keep her family together & protect the man she loves. Then a catastrophic real fire threatens everything.
The Returns by Philip Salom ($30, PB)
Elizabeth posts a ‘room for rent’ notice in Trevor’s bookshop & is caught off-guard when Trevor answers the ad himself. She expected a young student not a middle-aged bookseller whose marriage has fallen apart. But Trevor is attracted to Elizabeth’s house because of the empty shed in her backyard, the perfect space for him to revive the artistic career he abandoned years earlier. The face-blind, EH Holden-driving Elizabeth is a solitary & feisty book editor, and she accepts him, on probation... In this poignant yet upbeat novel the past keeps returning in the most unexpected ways. Elizabeth is at the beck and call of her ageing mother, and the associated memories of her childhood in a Rajneesh community. Trevor’s Polish father disappeared when Trevor was 15, and his mother died not knowing whether he was dead or alive. The authorities have declared him dead, but is he?
Mother of Pearl by Angela Savage ($30, PB)
Anna is an aid worker trying to settle back into life in Australia after more than a decade in Southeast Asia; Meg, Anna’s sister, holds out hope for a child despite 7 fruitless years of IVF; Meg’s husband Nate, and Mukda, a single mother in provincial Thailand want to do the right thing by her son & parents. The women and their families’ lives become intimately intertwined in the unsettling and extraordinary process of trying to bring a child into the world across borders of class, culture and nationality.
The Gospel According to Lazarus by Richard Zimler
According to the New Testament, Jesus resurrects Lazarus, but the Gospel of John doesn’t indicate whether he had any special purpose in doing so. Richard Zimler continues the story. Restored to physical health, Lazarus has difficulty picking up his former existence; his experience of death has left him fragile and disoriented, and he has sensed nothing of an afterlife. As he turns more and more to Jesus for guidance, while observing his friend’s growing mystical powers and influence, he finds their lives becoming dangerously entwined. Zimler places Jesus in the historical context of ancient Jewish practice and tradition; he is at once a charismatic rabbi and a political activist who uses his awareness of a transcendent reality—culminating in the Kingdom of Heaven—to inspire compassion for humankind and try to bring justice to his people. ($33, HB)
