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ISSUE TWO: MARCH 2017
underline For the love of reading
Ali Smith Here comes Autumn: the first in Ali Smith’s cyclical, Seasonal quartet is a meditation on time, love, the nature of storytelling and the brevity of life.
IN THIS ISSUE: CASSANDRA AUSTIN| ELLIOT PERLMAN | MODERN AUSTRALIAN CLASSICS
Underline Issue Two: March 2017
In This Issue
Publisher Penguin Random House Australia
Autumn 02 The first taste of Ali Smith’s shape-shifting Seasonal series
Editor / Chief Copywriter Samson McDougall
Shifting Sands Dr Rebecca Huntley explores Australianness
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Dust-Coloured Glasses How Cassandra Austin found the elusive germ of story
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All Fall Down An extract from Cassandra Austin’s gritty debut novel
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Bill Murray: Improvising Life Improve yourself with Gavin Edwards’ The Tao of Bill Murray
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The Ever-Expanding World of Elliot Perlman Your guide to his remarkable career to date
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Seven Types of Ambiguity An extract from Elliot Perlman’s 2003 bestseller
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Required Reading An introduction to six essential Modern Australian Classics
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Production Manager Lulu Mason Publication Design Cathie Glassby Printer Proudly in partnership with Adams Print
© Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or modified in any way unless permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd must be obtained before exercising any of its exclusive rights under copyright. Any views or opinions expressed by any author are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or any of its affiliates.
If you have any questions or comments, write to us at underline@penguinrandomhouse.com.au penguin.com.au
Idaho 24 An extract from Emily Ruskovich’s chilling debut Now and Then Candice Fox’s take on an Edgar Allan Poe crime classic
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Recipe 28 Phillippa’s Date Espresso Loaf End Notes Collected autumn reading
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FRONT COVER ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY
Editorial Director Ellie Morrow
underline For the love of reading
Every quarter, Underline brings together extracts, interviews, articles, short stories, reflections and much more to celebrate brilliant writing in its many forms. Designed to be dog-eared and devoured at your leisure, this is a chance to pause and delve a little further into some of the world’s finest literature, and the minds behind it. We hope you enjoy leafing through these pages as much as we did compiling them.
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EXTRACT ALI SMITH
Autumn By Ali Smith
Autumn is the first part of Ali Smith’s shape-shifting Seasonal quartet, casting an eye over our present-day history-making. Through four stand-alone novels – separate yet interconnected and cyclical, as the seasons are – the series will explore how we experience time, the recurring markers in the shapes of our lives, and our ways with narrative. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, looks to the future. In a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, in Autumn Smith questions who we are, what we’re becoming and how we measure richness and worth. 2
It was another Friday in the October holidays in 1995. Elisabeth was eleven years old. Mr Gluck from next door is going to look after you today, her mother said. I have to go to London again. I don’t need Daniel to look after me, Elisabeth said. You are eleven years old, her mother said. You don’t get a choice here. And don’t call him Daniel. Call him Mr Gluck. Be polite. What would you know about politeness? Elisabeth said. Her mother gave her a hard look and said the thing about her being like her father. Good, Elisabeth said. Because I wouldn’t want to end up being anything like you. Elisabeth locked the front door after her mother. She locked the back door too. She drew the curtains in the front room and sat dropping lit matches on to the sofa to test how fireproof the new three piece suite really was. She saw through a crack in the curtains Daniel coming up the front path. She opened the door even though she’d decided she wasn’t going to. Hello, he said. What you reading? Elisabeth showed him her empty hands. Does it look like I’m reading anything? she said. Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant. A constant what? Elisabeth said. A constant constancy, Daniel said. They went for a walk along the canal bank. Every time they passed someone, Daniel said hello. Sometimes the people said hello back. Sometimes they didn’t. It’s really not all right to talk to strangers, Elisabeth said. It is when you’re as old as I am, Daniel said. It’s not all right for a personage of your age. I am tired of being a personage of my age and of having no choices, Elisabeth said. Never mind that, Daniel said. That’ll pass in the blink of an eye. Now. Tell me. What you reading? The last book I read was called Jill’s Gymkhana, Elisabeth said. Ah. And what did it make you think about? Daniel said. Do you mean, what was it about? Elisabeth said. If you like, Daniel said. It was about a girl whose father has died, Elisabeth told him. Curious, Daniel said. It sounded like it might be more about horses. There’s a lot of horse stuff in it, obviously, Elisabeth said. In fact, the father who dies isn’t actually in it. He isn’t in it at all. Except that him not being there is the reason they move house, and her mother has to work, and the daughter gets interested in horses, and a gymkhana happens, and so on. Your father’s not dead, though? Daniel said.
No, Elisabeth said. He’s in Leeds. The word gymkhana, Daniel said, is a wonderful word, a word grown from several languages. Words don’t get grown, Elisabeth said. They do, Daniel said. Words aren’t plants, Elisabeth said. Words are themselves organisms, Daniel said. Oregano-isms, Elisabeth said. Herbal and verbal, Daniel said. Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there’s even more language waiting to come up. Can I ask you a question that’s not about me or my life in any way or about my mother’s life in any way either? Elisabeth said. You can ask me anything you like, Daniel said. But I can’t promise to answer what you ask unless I know a good enough answer. Fair enough, Elisabeth said. Did you ever go to hotels with people and at the same time pretend to a child you were meant to be being responsible for that you were doing something else? Ah, Daniel said. Before I answer that, I need to know whether there’s an implicit moral judgement in your question. If you don’t want to answer the question I asked you, Mr Gluck, you should just say so, Elisabeth said. Daniel laughed. Then he stopped laughing. Well, it depends on what your question really is, he said. Is it about the act of going to the hotel? Or is it about the people who do or don’t go to the hotel? Or is it about the pretending? Or is it about the act of pretending something to a child? Yes, Elisabeth said. In which case, is it a personal question to me, Daniel said, about whether I myself ever went to a hotel with someone? And in doing so chose to pretend to someone else that I wasn’t doing what I was doing? Or is it about whether it matters that the person I may or may not have pretended to was a child rather than an adult? Or is it more general than that, and you want to know whether it’s wrong to pretend anything to a child? All of the above, Elisabeth said. You are a very smart young person, Daniel said. I am planning to go to college when I leave school, Elisabeth said. If I can afford it. Oh, you don’t want to go to college, Daniel said. I do, Elisabeth said. My mother was the first in my family ever to go, and I will be the next. You want to go to collage, Daniel said. I want to go to college, Elisabeth said, to get an education and qualifications so I’ll be able to get a good job and make good money. Yes, but to study what? Daniel said. 3
‘She remembers there were two boys down on the rocks and they turned their heads as the watch arced through the air over them and hit the canal…’ 4
I don’t know yet, Elisabeth said. Humanities? Law? Tourism? Zoology? Politics? History? Art? Maths? Philosophy? Music? Languages? Classics? Engineering? Architecture? Economics? Medicine? Psychology? Daniel said. All of the above, Elisabeth said. That’s why you need to go to collage, Daniel said. You’re using the wrong word, Mr Gluck, Elisabeth said. The word you’re using is for when you cut out pictures of things or coloured shapes and stick them on paper. I disagree, Daniel said. Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange. Are you still using avoidance tactics about the question about the hotel? Elisabeth said. Truthfully? Daniel said. Yes. Which game would you rather play? I’ll give you a choice of two. One. Every picture tells a story. Two. Every story tells a picture. What does every story tells a picture mean? Elisabeth said. Today it means that I’ll describe a collage to you, Daniel said, and you can tell me what you think of it. Without actually seeing it? Elisabeth said. By seeing it in the imagination, as far as you’re concerned, he said. And in the memory, as far as I’m concerned. They sat down on a bench. A couple of kids were fishing off the rocks ahead of them. Their dog was standing on the rocks and shaking canal water off its coat. The boys squealed and laughed when the water fanned out into the air off the dog and hit them. Picture or story? Daniel said. You choose. Picture, she said. Okay, Daniel said. Close your eyes. Are they closed? Yes, Elisabeth said. The background is rich dark blue, Daniel said. A blue much darker than sky. On top of the dark blue, in the middle of the picture, there’s a shape made of pale paper that looks like a round full moon. On top of the moon, bigger than the moon, there’s a cut-out black and white lady wearing a swimsuit, cut from a newspaper or fashion magazine. And next to her, as if she’s leaning against it, there’s a giant human hand. And the giant hand is holding inside it a tiny hand, a baby’s hand. More truthfully, the baby’s hand is also holding the big hand, holding it by its thumb. Below all this, there’s a stylized picture of a woman’s face, the same face repeated several times, but with a different coloured curl of real hair hanging over its nose each time – Like at the hairdresser? Like colour samples? Elisabeth said. You’ve got it, Daniel said. She opened her eyes. Daniel’s were shut. She shut her own eyes again.
And way off in the distance, in the blue at the bottom of the picture, there’s a drawing of a ship with its sails up, but it’s small, it’s the smallest thing in the whole collage. Okay, Elisabeth said. Finally, there’s some pink lacy stuff, by which I mean actual material, real lace, stuck on to the picture in a couple of places, up near the top, then further down towards the middle too. And that’s it. That’s all I can recall. Elisabeth opened her eyes. She saw Daniel open his eyes a moment later. Later that night, when she was home and falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV, Elisabeth would remember seeing his eyes open, and how it was like that moment when you just happen to see the streetlights come on and it feels like you’re being given a gift, or a chance, or that you yourself’ve been singled out and chosen by the moment. What do you think? Daniel said. I like the idea of the blue and the pink together, Elisabeth said. Pink lace. Deep blue pigment, Daniel said. I like that you could maybe touch the pink, if it was made of lace, I mean, and it would feel different from the blue. Oh, that’s good, Daniel said. That’s very good. I like how the little hand is holding the big hand as much as the big hand is holding the little hand, Elisabeth said. Today I myself particularly like the ship, Daniel said. The galleon with the sails up. If I’m remembering rightly. If it’s even there. Does that mean it’s a real picture? Elisabeth said. Not one you made up? It’s real, Daniel said. Well, it was once. A friend of mine did it. An artist. But I’m making it up from memory. How did it strike your imagination? Like it would be if I was taking drugs, Elisabeth said. Daniel stopped on the canal path. You’ve never taken drugs, he said. Have you? No, but if I did, and everything was in my head all at once, all sort of crowding in, it would be a bit like it, Elisabeth said. Dear God. You’ll tell your mother we’ve been taking drugs all afternoon, Daniel said. Can we go and see it? Elisabeth said. See what? Daniel said. The collage? Elisabeth said. Daniel shook his head. I don’t know where it is, he said. It might be long gone by now. Goodness knows where those pictures are now in the world. Where did you see it in the first place? Elisabeth said. I saw it in the early 1960s, Daniel said. He said it as if a time could be a place. I was there the day she made it, he said.
Who? Elisabeth said. The Wimbledon Bardot, Daniel said. Who’s that? Elisabeth said. Daniel looked at his watch. Come on, art student, he said. Pupil of my eye. Time to go. Time flies, Elisabeth said. Well, yes. It can do, Daniel said. Literally. Watch this. Elisabeth doesn’t remember much of the above. She does remember, though, the day they were walking along the canal bank when she was small and Daniel took his watch off his wrist and threw it into the water. She remembers the thrill, the absolute not-doneness of it. She remembers there were two boys down on the rocks and they turned their heads as the watch arced through the air over them and hit the canal, and she remembers knowing that it was a watch, Daniel’s watch, not just any old stone or piece of litter, flying through the air, and knowing too that there was no way those boys could know this, that only she and Daniel knew the enormity of what he’d just done. She remembers that Daniel had given her the choice, to throw or not to throw. She remembers she chose to throw. She remembers coming home with something amazing to tell her mother. Here’s something else from another time, from when Elisabeth was thirteen, that she also only remembers shreds and fragments of. And anyway, why else are you always hanging round an old gay man? (That was her mother.) I don’t have a father fixation, Elisabeth said. And Daniel’s not gay. He’s European. Call him Mr Gluck, her mother said. And how do you know he’s not gay? And if that’s true, and he’s not gay, then what does he want with you? Or if he is, Elisabeth said, then he’s not just gay. He’s not just one thing or another. Nobody is. Not even you. Her mother was ultra-sensitive and ultra-irritating right now. It was something to do with Elisabeth being thirteen, not twelve. Whatever it was about, it was ultraannoying. Don’t be rude, her mother said. And what you are is thirteen years old. You’ve got to be a bit careful of old men who want to hang around thirteen year old girls. He’s my friend, Elisabeth said. He’s eighty five, her mother said. How is an eighty five year old man your friend? Why can’t you have normal friends like normal thirteen year olds? It depends on how you’d define normal, Elisabeth said. Which would be different from how I’d define normal. Since we all live in relativity and mine at the moment is not and I suspect never will be the same as yours. 5
‘He’s eighty five, her mother said. How is an eighty five year old man your friend? Why can’t you have normal friends like normal thirteen year olds?’ 6
Where are you learning to talk like this? her mother said. Is that what you do on those walks? We just walk, Elisabeth said. We just talk. About what? her mother said. Nothing, Elisabeth said. About me? her mother said. No! Elisabeth said. What, then? her mother said. About stuff, Elisabeth said. What stuff? her mother said. Stuff, Elisabeth said. He tells me about books and things. Books, her mother said. Books. Songs. Poets, Elisabeth said. He knows about Keats. Season of mists. Opening an opiate. He opened a what? her mother said. He knows about Dylan, Elisabeth said. Bob Dylan? her mother said. No, the other Dylan, Elisabeth said. He knows it off by heart, a lot of it. Though he did meet the singer Bob Dylan once, when Bob Dylan was staying with his friend. He told you he’s friends with Bob Dylan? her mother said. No. He met him. It was one winter. He was sleeping on a friend’s floor. Bob Dylan? On a floor? her mother said. I don’t think so. Bob Dylan has always been a huge international star. And he knows about that poet you like who killed herself, Elisabeth said. Plath? her mother said. About suicide? You so don’t get it, Elisabeth said. What exactly don’t I get about an old man putting ideas about suicide and a lot of lies about Bob Dylan into my thirteen year old daughter’s head? her mother said. And anyway, Daniel says it doesn’t matter how she died so long as you can still say or read her words. Like the line about no longer grieving, and the one about daughters of the darkness still flaming like Guy Fawkes, Elisabeth said. That doesn’t sound like Plath, her mother said. No, I’m almost completely sure I’ve never come across that line in any Plath I’ve read, and I’ve read it all. It’s Dylan. And the line about how love is evergreen, Elisabeth said. What else does Mr Gluck tell you about love? her mother said. He doesn’t. He tells me about paintings, Elisabeth said. Pictures. He shows you pictures? her mother said. By a tennis player he knew, Elisabeth said. They’re pictures people can’t actually go and see. So he tells me them. Why can’t people see them? her mother said. They just can’t, Elisabeth said. Private pictures? her mother said. No, Elisabeth said. They’re, like. Ones he knows. Of tennis players? her mother said. Tennis players doing what?
ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY
No, Elisabeth said. Oh God, her mother said. What have I done? What you’ve done is used Daniel as my unofficial babysitter for years, Elisabeth said. I told you. Call him Mr Gluck, her mother said. And I haven’t been using him. That’s just not true. And I want to know. I want to know in detail. Pictures of what? Elisabeth made an exasperated sound. I don’t know, she said. People. Things. What are the people doing in these pictures? her mother said. Elisabeth sighed. She shut her eyes. Open your eyes right now Elisabeth, her mother said. I have to close my eyes or I can’t see them, Elisabeth said. Okay? Right. Marilyn Monroe surrounded by roses, and then bright pink and green and grey waves painted all round her. Except that the picture isn’t literally of literal Marilyn, it’s a picture of a picture of her. That’s important to remember. Oh is it? her mother said. Like if I was to take a photo of you and then paint a picture of the photo, not you. And the roses look a bit like flowery wallpaper rather than roses. But the roses have also come out of the wallpaper and have curled up round her collarbone, like they’re embracing her. Embracing, her mother said. I see. And someone French, someone famous in France once, a man, he’s wearing a hat and sunglasses, and the top of the hat is a pile of red petals like a huge red flower, and he’s grey and black and white like a picture in a paper, and behind him is all bright orange, partly like a cornfield or golden grass, and above him is a row of hearts. Her mother had her hands over her own eyes at the kitchen table. Keep going, she said. Elisabeth shut her eyes again. One with a woman, not a famous person, she’s just any woman and she’s laughing, she’s sort of throwing her arms up in a blue sky, and behind her at the foot of the picture there are alps, but very small, and a lot of zigzags in colours. And instead of having a body or clothes, the woman’s insides are made up of pictures, pictures of other things. He told you about a woman’s body, a woman’s insides, her mother said. No, Elisabeth said. He told me about a woman whose body is made up of pictures instead of body. It’s perfectly clear. What pictures? Pictures of what? her mother said. Things. Things that happen in the world, Elisabeth said. A sunflower. A man with a machine gun like out of a gangster film. A factory. A Russian looking politician. An owl, an exploding airship – And Mr Gluck makes these pictures up in his head and puts them inside a woman’s body? her mother said. No, they’re real, Elisabeth said. There’s one called It’s a
Man’s World. It’s got a stately home in it, and the Beatles and Elvis Presley and a president in the back of a car getting shot. That was when her mother started really yelling. So she decided not to tell her mother about the collages with the children’s heads being snipped off with the giant secateurs, and the massive hand coming out of the roof of the Albert Hall. She decided not to mention the painting of a woman sitting on a backwards-turned chair with no clothes on, who brought a government down, and all the red paint and the black smudges through the red, that look, Daniel says, like nuclear fallout. Even so, her mother still said it at the end of their talk (and this is what Elisabeth does remember, verbatim, nearly two decades later, of the above conversation): Unnatural. Unhealthy. You’re not to. I forbid it. That’s enough. A minute ago it was June. Now the weather is September. The crops are high, about to be cut, bright, golden. November? unimaginable. Just a month away. The days are still warm, the air in the shadows sharper. The nights are sooner, chillier, the light a little less each time. Dark at half past seven. Dark at quarter past seven, dark at seven. The greens of the trees have been duller since August, since July really. But the flowers are still coming. The hedgerows are still humming. The shed is already full of apples and the tree’s still covered in them. The birds are on the powerlines. The swifts left weeks ago. They’re hundreds of miles from here by now, somewhere over the ocean.
Extracted from Autumn by Ali Smith. Hamish Hamilton, October 2016. 7
INSIGHTS STILL LUCKY
Shifting Sands In her new book, Still Lucky, Dr Rebecca Huntley explains why we should feel optimistic about Australia and its people. Here she shines a spotlight on our changing perceptions of Australianness.
Dr Rebecca Huntley is one of Australia’s most experienced and knowledgeable social researchers. As director of the Ipsos Mind & Mood report, our longest running study on community attitudes, for almost a decade she had privileged access to the hopes, fears and aspirations of everyday Australians. During this time spent travelling the country, conducting discussion groups tackling the biggest social questions we face, Huntley discovered in our hearts and minds we have more in common than we might have thought. In her 2017 book, Still Lucky, Huntley draws from this qualitative 8
research to paint an optimistic picture of who as a nation we are, and where we’re heading. ‘My aim in this book is to make you feel better about this country, better about your fellow Australians, than you felt before you read it,’ she writes. ‘This is not a book for cynics. It’s a wholeheartedly positive account of the people of Australia. It’s my attempt, through sharing and analysing the research I’ve done over ten years, to show you that we are far better, far wiser and far more united than the cynics on the right or the left would have us believe. It’s also a book about our common ground, what we agree on
and the shared vision we have about the future.’ From the pages of Still Lucky, here Huntley and her discussion-group participants explore the notion of how we define Australian identity.
In 2011, in response to persistent questions from clients and the media about the nature and changing shape of Australian identity, I decided it was time to dedicate a whole Mind & Mood report to this issue. The question of Australian identity had been covered thoroughly by Hugh
Mackay in a report called ‘Being Australian’ written in Australia’s bicentennial year, 1988. That report found that at least on a superficial level, discussion-group participants could easily list our national characteristics. The ‘typical Aussie’ was a bit of a larrikin (with its implied masculinity), rural rather than urban, easy-going as opposed to pompous, good-humoured and self-deprecating, down to earth, resilient and a good sport. Interestingly, he also lacked national pride, not because he was ashamed to be an Aussie but because extreme nationalism required a level of earnestness and effort that seemed to work against his naturally laidback character. The typical Australian, according to people in the late 1980s, was devoid of arrogance, made a virtue of modesty, enjoyed ‘taking the mickey’ out of anyone who showed signs of taking themselves too seriously, and drank beer because it was an unpretentious drink suited to our hot weather. It’s fairly clear that in 1988 the definition of what it meant to be Australian was shaped by perceptions of what it was to be English (pompous), American (take yourself too seriously) and European (wine drinkers). By 2011 this stereotypical ‘Tourism Australia’ view of national identity had shifted. The discussion instead was marked by queries and ambivalent statements. There was no easyto-repeat list of characteristics and behaviours, but a series of questions. How unique are our so-called ‘typical Aussie traits’? ‘Everyone’s values are the same. How are we different? What values have we got that make us different to anybody else? We keep saying “Australian”. What’s different? That we like sports? So does every other country. And drinking? Are Australians big drinkers? Are we good friends at pubs? Shit, that happens everywhere.’ Groups systematically went through and questioned all the values we think of as Australian. Are we laidback or hard-working? One woman said, ‘We’re generally easy-going. Relaxed.
Laidback.’ Her friend replied, ‘Remind us that we all said that tomorrow when we’re at work.’ In another group, a person commented, ‘There is this whole thing about us being lazy and laidback, but we work so hard.’ Are we tolerant or xenophobic? ‘Is there an “us and them” element to being Australian?’ ‘What about the attitude to the boat people? There’s a bit of intolerance there. Is our notion of mateship limited?’ ‘It’s Australian to look after your mate but if you are not my mate, then, whatever.’ ‘I think we are really good in a crisis and we band together when we need to, but apart from that people
‘there were only two things that emerged as uniquely Australian: koalas and Medicare.’ are quite standoffish. I don’t know my neighbours. Does anyone here know their neighbours?’ All of the discussion groups wrestled with how to define our national identity. ‘What do we stand for? What does it mean to be an Australian? I don’t feel like I know what it is.’ ‘It’s interesting that we’ve had a conversation for forty minutes now and we can’t come up with something that’s quintessentially Australian.’ For some participants, their inability to define Australianness was the result of the dramatic social and economic changes that have occurred
since the 1960s. An ironclad certainty about Australian identity seems to be a throwback to a time of high tariffs, when men worked the land and women worked at home, an economy built on wheat and wool, and where Anglos outnumbered people with darker skin. ‘I think the Australian identity is in conflict. Once upon a time we had a very distinct identity of who we were.’ ‘Is that the Australian that everybody is, or is that the Australian that everybody was, or what everybody wants? We’re sitting here thinking of all these ideas that are Australian but we don’t really hold to them any more.’ After reviewing all the discussions across the groups, there were only two things that emerged as uniquely Australian: koalas and Medicare. I’m not entirely joking. Australia’s animals, natural landscape and built environment were elements participants could claim as unique and iconic to Australia – our strange marsupials and giant birds, Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. And Medicare stood out as the best example of our still strong social safety net (and something we are very attached to, if the Labor Party’s effective ‘Mediscare’ campaign during the 2016 election is anything to go by). While the ‘Being Australian’ study of 1988 showed Australians were beginning to question the myth and the reality of national identity, that questioning had reached an advanced stage by 2011. Three aspects of our national identity were particularly scrutinised by participants – our love of a drink, of sport and our commitment to the ‘fair go’. They were areas about which participants asked genuine, searching questions – questions not necessarily posed by those in the 1988 report. Is our love of sport healthy? Is our attachment to alcohol healthy? And, interestingly, can we really claim to be an egalitarian society? Still Lucky by Rebecca Huntley. Viking, February 2017. 9
INTERVIEW CASSANDRA AUSTIN
Dust-Coloured Glasses
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PHOTO: DAN PROUD
From the ‘safety’ of her Los Angeles home, former NSW country kid Cassandra Austin has crafted a debut novel caked in the red dust of outback Australia. Wry, rich and unsettling, All Fall Down scratches at the crust of what haunts us about this ‘glowering, cracking, twitching land’.
‘Always hot, always dry and always a marvellous adventure.’ This is how novelist Cassandra Austin describes her upbringing on an irrigation farm near Finley in rural NSW. It was a childhood of hand-rearing poddy calves, headless snakes hung on fences, mouse plagues, kangaroos bounding through the crops. Looking back now – from her adult life in Los Angeles – Austin remembers a time of much magic. ‘I was told to run indoors as the sun was eclipsed by low-flying swarms of locusts that ate everything in their path,’ she says. ‘Then came the delighted squawk of chooks as they in turn plucked dead locusts from the grilles of the farm vehicles… The soil was so magical it could grow anything if you just added water. That was always the trick to where I grew up near Finley: just add water.’ 11
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new alien phase of my life.’ Austin’s first novella, Seeing George – a love triangle turned on its head – was published in 2004. But her careers in criminology and film had yet to be wound down. Then came a master’s degree, two babies, economic and health crises. Life got in the way of her desire to write books fulltime, but she never entirely hit the brakes on the dream. In February 2017, her debut novel, All Fall Down – a stark Australian Gothic story about a community divided – finally arrived. Upon reflection, Austin now realises the elapsed time between books was critical to allowing her to find the story she wanted to write. ‘All Fall Down was a short story at first and when I showed it to my husband, he replied that I’d written the Australian version of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”,’ she says. ‘I had never heard of it and was furious at not being original – something age has cured me of – but in a funny way, not having to be original allowed me to tunnel even further into my version of the meaning of sacrifice… I don’t think there is a set way to write a novel anyway. No matter how carefully you place down the breadcrumbs so you can retrace your steps, the birds eat them all up.’ A story, says Austin, like a person, can lead many different lives. All Fall Down had several; Austin wrote five completely different iterations over a total of eight
PHOTO: ADAM SIMON
The seed of Austin’s love for literature and storytelling was planted early. ‘At the age of seven my father gave me the honour of naming a new bull and I called it Beginner, after the Dr Seuss Beginner Books,’ she says. ‘I was always that child whose name had to be called umpteen times because my head was stuck in a book. And then, as I grew older, I was the cousin who would gather the younger kids onto a bed and tell them scary stories.’ Into adulthood Austin continued to cultivate these passions, which have now become, she says, her ‘secret, fascinating, unrestricted life outside the mummying and school volunteering and daily-ness of existence’. It was the move to L.A. in 1998 that first allowed Austin the space to explore writing as a limitless passion. ‘The only person I knew was my then partner, now husband, Adam. I wasn’t legally allowed to work so it was my chance to give writing a go as a main occupation instead of an interstitial one,’ she says. Being a stranger in a strange land was an isolating experience, and for Austin this immersion in words proved useful as a coping mechanism. ‘Writing is an intensely solitary vocation,’ she continues. ‘For a long time I had no friends and I would cry in the bathroom after various dinner parties, misunderstanding social and cultural cues that mystified me... Sharing words is not the same as sharing meaning, and writing became the tool to help me reconfigure this
‘It does something to your trust in the land when you’re so dependent on it and it seems so stingy.’
years. ‘Even though the very same events of this single story I wanted to tell could be arranged as a terrifying horror novel, a cosmic comedy narrated by an omniscient eye, or even a dust-swept outback romance, none of those versions were what this book always was in my heart,’ she says. ‘So I had to get back to where it started, the germ of the tale I first told as a simple short story, and that germ was sacrifice. Human sacrifice.’ Set in the fictional Australian desert outpost of Mululuk, All Fall Down is the story of a newcomer, a city teenager,
Rachel, who is trying to make sense of alien surroundings and a fractured community. Told from multiple perspectives, the stories and secrets of the town and its people unravel to present an unsettling vision of small-town life. ‘On the outskirts of town now they whisk past lonely dongas... Then come the portables, with threadbare hammocks and cardboard boxes full of empty beer bottles propped up against the outside walls. And finally the square and weathered houses sitting in the middle of wide acres of dust with kids running barefoot, dogs yapping after footballs, and car doors, tyres, bits of engine strewn about as though a factory exploded.’ It’s outback Australia in unflattering light; far removed from Austin’s idyllic childhood memories of Finley. The physical extremes were necessary, she says, to take readers to the emotional crux of disconnection, loneliness and sacrifice that was demanded by the story. After so many years living abroad, Austin felt free to explore Australia’s complexities through fresh eyes. And in doing so she created an outback both familiar and impossible. ‘I’m so in love with Australia, I’m not sure distance could serve to bring me any clarity about it,’ she says. ‘It’s like trying to properly hug an elephant: impossible… But I’m a fiction writer: I don’t necessarily want to see clearly, I want to evoke emotion and for me that requires extremes.’ The big difference between Austin’s Finley and Rachel’s Mululuk, she says, is the presence of precious life-sustaining water. ‘Mululuk is as dry as Mars,’ she continues. ‘They rely on artesian bore water to survive. It does something to your trust in the land when you’re so dependent on it and it seems so stingy.’ Like her influencers Kenneth Cook, Joan Lindsay, Tim Winton, Barbara Baynton and Patrick White, in All Fall Down Austin sets out to capture an Australian environment capable of clawing its way into every action and interaction, as if a character itself. ‘I tried to pay particular attention to the smell on a breeze, or the sting of sunburn, so that the experience of Mululuk was full-bodied and close,’ she says. ‘The reader never gets a truly clear picture of it geographically. I wanted to keep the sense of claustrophobia… ‘My husband and I have an ongoing argument about which of our countries is scarier, Australia or America. I think he is mad, of course. Americans and their guns are far scarier than the blue-ringed octopi or venomous platypi that Australia has to offer. Toddlers killing siblings with guns procured from their mothers’ purses: that is the substance of the American nightmare. ‘But then my husband goes beyond the shark attacks and the 20-minutes-and-you’re-dead snakebites and argues that it is the very land beneath the feet, this glowering, cracking, twitching land, and what we did to it and to those who already inhabited it, that truly haunts Australians. And I can’t disagree. In our Gothic literature the bush, the drought, the inhospitable desert – the very land itself becomes the monster.’ 13
EXTRACT
All Fall Down BY CASSANDRA AUSTIN
As Janice drives onto the bridge, bitumen hums beneath her tyres, sleek after the gravel corrugations that trail the rest of Mululuk. She barely notices. Too irritated by the blaze of lights. Out of habit she flicks off her headlights, wishing for quiet black. But there is no relief: enormous globes jut upward from the railing, scorching the night air and romancing insects to a quick, sizzling death. Perhaps if there were water flowing underneath the bridge, a gurgling river, the harsh glare would be carried away over ripples, or reflected gently back. But there is only a chasm of dry red dust, so the hot lights wick what little moisture there is from the desert air and, outside this skirt of light, Mululuk’s houses, pubs, dongas and mining machinery are bathed in black. Gone. Janice wishes the lights were gone. Months ago, before the lights were up, Janice would drive across the bridge, cut her headlights and make everything disappear. Just she and the car flying through the darkness, up with the stars. It was a gift: that stretch of time in the rich black air, suspended between the two sides of Mululuk. The feeling that she didn’t have to choose. So she came to drive over it and cut her headlights again and again, stopping time, quieting her panic. Until the globes arrived, obliterating the sweet black. And then her baby was born. The baby she has left at home. Just until she can sort out her life. Janice takes a deep breath and leans into the steering wheel, searching for the spray-painted message she saw this afternoon. Anna Pavlova. Dripping red letters on a bit of bridge railing calling to her. And here she is, answering him. Being ridiculous in the middle of the night. Her hands on the steering wheel look old, every line deep under the glare of artificial light. What is she doing? It will all be talk anyway. That’s all Shane can do. And she has left Flora at home by herself. That’s wrong. This is wrong. 14
She suddenly swings her car around into the oncoming lane. But the bridge, while very long, is not wide enough for one smooth U-turn and she has to reverse to complete the manoeuvre. She is shifting into drive again when a loud crack splits the dry air. The night pauses, the car stalls, and her white face looks out, alarmed. The crack is followed by an ear-splitting screech: tiny rivets shearing through metalwork as though it were butter. The massive concrete span fractures. Plummets. There is a thunderous tumult of crumbling girders and Janice’s car skids sideways, down, falling with pieces of concrete and steel large as boats to smash into the earth. Those bright lights go too, bursting into electrical fireworks as cabling snaps and wires recoil like hissing snakes. All the lights gone, as she wished. After blooming from the mouth of the chasm, the violence of the collapse is quickly subdued, reduced to an aftermath of trickling rubble. The red soil that flew into the air at impact now billows, weeping, and for a moment the night is again quiet. Dark and shapeless. Then one dog, two dogs, an orchestra of dogs starts barking.
Rachel and her dog wait on a small platform in front of a single set of train tracks, scared. She can’t see the tracks, or anything else, because the night air is so brutally black out here in the desert it is like trying to see through oil. She quietly shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Frigid air creeps up her calf muscles, but she daren’t stamp her feet; too afraid to make noise. This platform is just a piece of concrete, as small and high as an altar, and just as bare. It has no wall or fence or other barrier to whatever is out there. Her hand grips the torch in her jacket pocket. It is low on battery and she has kept it off, trying to be brave. Reminding herself that even if she can’t see the platform
now, she saw it when it was flooded with yellow light from the carriage doorway. The conductor ummed and ahhed about leaving her, but she thought she saw her uncle’s headlights in the distance and her jacket was warm enough for those few minutes. It was only when the train’s iron wheels grated up to speed that the headlights became cigarette butts, flaring down the other end of the train before the smokers flicked them into the pitch. So the train left and she stood watching the red taillights telescope into the distance and disappear. Like hope. A flick of a switch and the torch is on. It doesn’t help. The thin beam fails against the desert night. Aimed downwards the light dips into sponge-like erosions in the weathered concrete, reveals an untied shoelace and makes shadows with her dog’s weird fingerlike feet. But upward or outward the light stops. Like the night ate it. So she and the dog look only down, and while they do the wall of black air creeps closer. She could try to sleep, but all she can think about is dying. The single set of train tracks means there is only the one train travelling from Adelaide at the bottom of the country to Darwin at the top, and then it goes all the way back down again, with four lost days in between. Her mobile phone is useless too. It sat beside her on the gently swaying train, the reception bars rising and falling until they never climbed again. There is nothing to do but wait. A tiny moth flies at her torch. She watches it flutter. Another comes. And another. Soon the night snows small brown moths. They stream toward the light but are happy to land in her hair, on her arms. At the bitter taste of powdered wing she spits, then covers the torch. The edges of her fingers glow red, her art teacher’s favourite colour, but the moths are not
‘Her trembling fingers can’t get the torch to switch on at first. Then she swings it around, seeing nothing. Until the eyes appear.’
fooled. Her dog snaps at them, lunging and barking, and the whole thing gets crazy until she turns off the source of light. Wings flicker against her cheek, nostrils, and then nothing. There are only the stars now: fiery brilliance way, way up. She can’t see a finger in front of her face but can see objects trillions of miles away. She’s heard that in the country the stars and moon can light up the landscape, but she can’t see the moon. Maybe she’s on it. The dog’s toenails tick against the concrete and then stop as the animal slumps to scratch, metal identification tags clinking. A loud noise. Rachel lunges for him, grabbing the tags, and they stay like that a while, her dog at her feet, velvety and bony the way greyhounds are, and she standing in the dark, pretending not to be scared. She mouths the address: 31 Coree Street, Mululuk, Tirari-Sturt Stony Desert, Central Australia. Her father made her memorise it. Doesn’t want her getting lost after going to the trouble of sending her away. Something strikes the sand somewhere in the black. A heavy sound. Then again. The dog leaps to his feet, loudly licking his mouth. Rachel cowers, grabbing his smooth-haired skull, trying to calm herself, but the skin tautens along the dog’s jawbone, back near the ears, frightening her further. What is it? Her trembling fingers can’t get the torch to switch on at first. Then she swings it around, seeing nothing. Until the eyes appear. The red discs flash with silver as they move slightly. Staring at them. Hair stands up along her arms. She can’t help shaking. It is impossible to tell how far away he is but the eyes are high, almost as high as she and the dog, and they are standing on the altar of platform. ‘Hello?’ Her voice is thin. The dog whimpers, thrusts forward, his head narrow at the muzzle like an arrow pointing. ‘Settle down, Moustache,’ she whispers, pretending. She hopes he will bark, will fly at those eyes, but he retreats, pawing at the cement beneath their feet and turning in a circle, his strip of tail curbed between his legs. And then the eyes disappear. A thump of feet coming. She screams, dropping the torch. The dog barks and the feet bound on, but away now instead of toward. Soft regular thuds: a kangaroo. Rachel wants to cry, stops herself by peering over the edge of the platform where the torch fell, watching as the moths batter it with love. Just a roo. Her heart clamours in her chest. If her uncle has had a car accident she will rot out here on the concrete. Or the moths will eat her. Crawling backwards, she bumps into the suitcase. Sits. Lets Moustache lick at a trace of tear while she runs her fingers in the soft pockets of his ears, down his question mark of hind leg. She loves him as though he was herself. Pulling him up against her, she leans into him, keeping guard, but when the first shock of sunlight rounds the earth it is to trace their sleeping features. Extracted from All Fall Down by Cassandra Austin. Hamish Hamilton, February 2017. 15
LIFE ADVICE THE TAO OF BILL MURRAY
Bill Murray: Improvising Life ‘You are standing on a corner in New York City, waiting to cross the street.’ So opens The Tao of Bill Murray: Gavin Edwards’ introduction to Murray’s guiding philosophy, and collection of the most epic, hilarious and strange Bill Murray anecdotes ever told. ‘Lost in thought,’ Edwards continues, ‘you aren’t paying much attention to the world around you. Suddenly a man puts his hands over your eyes and says, “Guess who?” ‘Nobody’s played this game with you since elementary school. It would be alarming, except that the voice 16
is familiar. You can’t quite place the speaker, but you’re pretty sure he’s a friend. ‘You whip around and see, much to your surprise… international film star Bill Murray. He is taller than you expected and his shirt is wrinkled. You sputter, groping for words, unable to process the unlikelihood of this situation. Bill grins, leans in close, and quietly says, “No one will ever believe you.”’ Bill Murray is renowned as an eccentric prankster, a prolific gate-crasher, photo-bomber; a
freewheeling anarchic spirit who embodies a unique breed of all-American tomfoolery. With Murray, Edwards says, everything seems possible. And being alive in a world open to the infinite possibilities of the man is something worth celebrating. In The Tao of Bill Murray, among real-life stories of joy, enlightenment and party crashing, historical sidenotes and filmmaking factoids, Edwards unleashes on the world ‘The Ten Principles of Bill’. Here readers can discover the logic behind such lofty insights as: ‘Surprise is golden.
ILLUSTRATION: R. SIKORYAK
Let Gavin Edwards’ The Tao of Bill Murray guide you to a better version of yourself.
Randomness is lobster.’ ‘Invite yourself to the party.’ And ‘Drop coin on the world.’ By applying Murray’s philosophical tenets to your own life, says Edwards, you may discover the path to a better version of yourself. Murray has said that he is the best version of himself when he’s working on a film set. So his filmography is not just a list of roles performed by a fine actor, it’s an alternate map of the Tao of Bill. From the pages of The Tao of Bill Murray, here Edwards offers some insights into what’s undoubtedly one of Murray’s crowning achievements, his performance in the role of Dr. Peter Venkman in the 1984 classic Ghostbusters.
The apex of Bill Murray’s early career was Ghostbusters, where his attitude blended perfectly with ectoplasmic special effects for a smash hit. On paper, his Venkman character doesn’t seem particularly appealing: He’s lecherous, self-absorbed, and mildly sadistic. But Bill made him seem like the epitome of cool – a wisecracking guy who saved New York City from a vengeful god without breaking a sweat. When Bill started shooting Ghostbusters with director Ivan Reitman and costars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, he was still dazed and jetlagged from The Razor’s Edge, which had wrapped only days before. He made an abrupt transition from monasteries in the Himalayas, taking a Concorde to New York City and going straight from the airport to a set on the corner of Madison Avenue and 62nd Street. He had dropped thirty-five pounds while shooting in India, and his first couple of weeks back, he slept as much as possible. The culture shock was severe: ‘Ten days ago I was up there working with the high lamas in a gompa, and here I am removing ghosts from drugstores and painting slime on my body,’ he reflected. ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ But Bill couldn’t help being
himself. Ramis remembered the movie’s first day shooting on the streets of New York: ‘Bill and Danny and I were just hanging out on the street, and everyone recognized Bill and Danny from Saturday Night Live. Someone walked by and said, “Hey, Bill Murray!” And Bill said, in a mock-angry voice, “You son of a bitch!” And he grabbed the guy and he wrestled him to the ground. Just a passerby. The guy was completely amazed – and laughing all the way to the ground.’ Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason Reitman (the director of Juno and Up in the Air), studied the differences between the screenplay and the produced film when he staged a live reading of the
‘Back off, man. I’m a scientist.’ script in 2012. ‘While almost all the dialogue in [the] original screenplay is echoed onscreen, the Venkman character is completely improvised,’ he reported. ‘It’s as if Bill Murray was given a mumblecore-style essay about each scene and then permitted to say whatever he wanted as long as he got the point across. He’s like a jazz musician who knows, “I have eight measures here and have to hit this note here and as long as I follow those rules everything else is up to me.”’ Ernie Hudson played Winston Zeddemore, the fourth Ghostbuster, a part that Aykroyd said he originally wrote with Eddie Murphy in mind and that got scaled back when Murphy didn’t join the cast. (Ivan
Reitman disputed this – his memory was that the role was always intended as a secondary part but it got bolstered during filming, when they discovered how good Hudson was.) Hudson said that Bill was directly responsible for making sure that he didn’t get squeezed out as the movie got rewritten on the fly, making sure that he got some choice dialogue: ‘Well, wait a minute, what about Ernie here?’ Hudson also got to see what life was like for Bill Murray: ‘I saw people driving down the streets and go, “Oh my God!” and slam on their brakes and jump out of their cars while they’re still running. And run over and go, “Bill Murray! Holy shit, man! Oh fuck, I can’t believe it’s you!” Bill just never ran from it. He would just wade down the street, like he was the mayor.’ Bill, Hudson said, never seemed to worry about his personal safety, or the film’s schedule. ‘A guy would say, “Bill, you know, I got this record collection…” and Bill would take off with him.’ At the end of the movie, after the Ghostbusters dispatch the gargantuan Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, white fluff covers Aykroyd, Ramis, and Hudson from head to toe – but not Bill. Why not? ‘It’s one of the mistakes I made as a director,’ Ivan Reitman confessed. ‘I thought, “He’s the one who always escapes consequence.” A little bit of a metaphor for what he’s really like in his life. But I probably should have done it – covering him in slime was so delicious and became such an iconic moment. Anyway, it was a choice that I’ve second-guessed myself on ever since.’
SOURCES: • INTERVIEW WITH IVAN REITMAN. • BREZNICAN, ANTHONY, ‘“GHOSTBUSTERS” LIVE-READ GRABS SETH ROGEN, JACK BLACK, AND RAINN WILSON,’ EW.COM, DECEMBER 11, 2012. • LABRECQUE, JEFF, ‘GHOSTBUSTERS: AN ORAL HISTORY,’ EW.COM, NOVEMBER 14, 2014.
The Tao of Bill Murray by Gavin Edwards. Century, September 2016. 17
A GUIDE TO... ELLIOT PERLMAN
The Ever-Expanding World of Elliot Perlman A look at the multidimensional career of Elliot Perlman – an author intent on confounding expectations.
The ABC TV adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s 2003 novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity – featuring an all-star cast including Hugo Weaving, Susie Porter and Alex Dimitriades – is slated for release in 2017. Upon publication, this psychological mystery told from seven perspectives marked an ambitious raising of the bar from a writer 18
becoming known as a distinctive voice in Australian literature. It was a runaway international bestseller, and in Australia it was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin as well as for the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction. Books had an enormous impact on Perlman as a child, and he started
storytelling as soon as he could write. While practising law in 1994 he won The Age short story competition for ‘The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming’, which became the titular story of his bestselling collection, released in 1999. His debut novel, Three Dollars, arrived to much acclaim in 1998. And the big-screen adaptation – co-written by
PHOTO: MATT COLLINS
‘Often writers might choose to be ambiguous, especially poets, but I try to hold myself accountable for any unintentional ambiguity. As Orwell teaches us, clarity of expression is paramount for a writer.’
Perlman and director Robert Connolly, and starring David Wenham and Frances O’Connor – was awarded the 2005 Australian Film Industry Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His next novel was Seven Types of Ambiguity, and then in 2011 Perlman’s third, The Street Sweeper, was published. Epic in scale, it deals with love, guilt, heroism, the extremes of racism and unexpected kindness, spanning the globe and the twentieth century to trace almost invisible lines of human connection. Perlman describes himself as a child of 19th-century authors like Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy – writers, he says, who create all-encompassing worlds that, through their characters and settings, tell us about society at that time. It’s unsurprising, then, that each career step Perlman has taken represents an enormous leap in terms of the scope of his storytelling. As his novels have become increasingly complex and far-reaching, Perlman says he relies on prolific note-taking as well as elements of his
legal training to help him keep the big picture in check, while colouring his worlds with finer details. ‘I think having studied and practised law encouraged me to try to be as clear as I can be in my written expression,’ he says. ‘Often writers might choose to be ambiguous, especially poets, but I try to hold myself accountable for any unintentional ambiguity. As Orwell teaches us, clarity of expression is paramount for a writer. Legal training can also encourage someone to think of the other side of an argument which can stimulate empathy, and writers benefit professionally (and personally) from empathy… There are changes in form and style but one is essentially engaged in the same basic enterprise: I want to tell you a story.’ For now, Perlman says he has no desire to outstrip his most recent novels in terms of magnitude. But an upcoming challenge, children’s novel The Adventures of Catvinkle (due for release in 2018), will put his storytelling abilities to the supreme test, and again take his career into unexplored territory. From his brilliant short stories to his panoramic novels, here we look back at Elliot Perlman’s remarkable body of work so far, and offer a snippet of Seven Types of Ambiguity, to whet your appetite before its anticipated TV debut. THREE DOLLARS 1998
Humorous and dramatic, Three Dollars is about Eddie, an honest, compassionate man who finds himself, at the age of 38, with a wife, a child and three dollars. How did he get that way? And who is Amanda? He cared about people; he was, Amanda notwithstanding, a good husband, father and son. At any other time the world would have smiled on him. But this was the nineties and the world valued other things. Three Dollars chronicles a breach of the social contract, and its effect on a home near you. It is a deft portrait of a man attempting to retain his humanity, his family and his sense
of humour in grim and pitiless times of downsizing, outsourcing and privatising. THE REASONS I WON’T BE COMING 1999
Passionate, witty, vulnerable, intelligent and honest – these are the distinctive features of the Elliot Perlman short stories featured in this collection. Perlman’s clever and thoughtful tales explore the complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students and murderers; the corporate betrayals, the lost opportunities, the hopes, the fears and the vagaries of desire. SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 2003
Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work school teacher takes matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events neither he nor his psychiatrist could have anticipated. At once a psychological thriller and a social critique, Seven Types of Ambiguity is a story of obsessive love in an age of obsessive materialism. THE STREET SWEEPER 2011
Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams, an African American probationary janitor in a Manhattan hospital and father of a little girl he can’t locate, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor who had been a prisoner in AuschwitzBirkenau. A few kilometres uptown, Australian historian Adam Zignelik finds both his career and his longterm romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging out of the depths of his own personal history, Adam sees, in a promising research topic suggested by an American World War II veteran, the beginnings of something that might just save him professionally and perhaps even personally. As these two men try to survive in early 21st-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen. 19
EXTRACT
Seven Types of Ambiguity BY ELLIOT PERLMAN
It is quite well understood that a clinically depressed person will show little, if any, interest in constructive activity concerning future events or outcomes. In this respect, Simon has only flirted with depression in its definitive or clinical form. But if that is all that depression required, then I could say without much hesitation that Simon has always been, other than for short periods, too involved in things to be clinically depressed. William really knows very little about what’s on his son’s mind. What he and many people don’t understand is that there is more to depression than a sometimes overwhelming feeling of inadequacy and hopelessness and profound sadness. When people are depressed they are sometimes very, very angry. They are not just quietly miserable. They can be filled with great passion. Simon was sitting on a chair under a sun umbrella in a large well-cared-for garden with an inground swimming pool in the centre and birches and firs along the perimeter. He got up and we shook hands and introduced ourselves. I was struck by his clean handsomeness and by his calm. One rarely meets anyone who makes a better first impression than Simon. Do you remember? He thanked me for coming, saying he realised such a meeting was probably unusual. I said something banal about having to expect the unexpected in my line of business and then he quoted someone, some verse about surprises or chance, in that soothing voice of his. I don’t know why, but I was a bit nervous. He asked me questions as though he was interviewing me and making mental notes: middle-aged, separated, lives inner city, et cetera. I must have passed because he seemed to take a bit of a liking to me, albeit with some reserve. Perhaps I didn’t fit his stereotype of a psychiatrist. I don’t know. He told me not to completely ignore whatever it was his father had told me about him, saying his father’s description of him no doubt contained what Simon called ‘that dangerous element of truth’, just enough to make me suspect that everything else his father had said, and would ever say, was true. He was utterly charming, witty, and seemingly quite relaxed and intelligent. I was a little surprised he hadn’t offered me at least a drink, but I didn’t comment. We 20
Europeans are instinctively better hosts, whether we have personality disorders or not. I didn’t know him and perhaps he would never again be so forthcoming. It’s not that I expect patients to entertain me but the circumstances here were quite unusually informal. And I didn’t want to interrupt him. Perhaps he felt a little uncomfortable offering me his parents’ alcohol. I figured a place of that size with the inground pool, the tennis court and the satellite dish had to belong to his parents. They must have agreed to go out for the evening as part of the deal. ‘I am a thirty-two-year-old out of work teacher living on my own in a flat in Elwood,’ he laughed, ‘but just because I don’t work doesn’t mean I’m broken.’ Then, after some small talk, he started telling me about you. At first I didn’t realise how long it had been since you had been together. It wasn’t clear, so I asked him. ‘It finished nine years ago,’ he said, ‘and you want to know why I’m still talking about it, right?’ ‘No, I didn’t say that,’ I responded. ‘No. You didn’t, but only because my father is paying you not to tell me I’m mad, or at least to tell him first. I think it’s admirable what you guys do but, shit, it’s embarrassingly primitive, wouldn’t you say? What do you really know? And in any particular case, in my case, what do you really want to know? I’m afraid it won’t make sense to you. I really mean that. I am genuinely afraid it won’t make sense. I am not trying to sound casual or smug. ‘Listen—all that she was then, all that she is now, those gestures, everything I remember but won’t or can’t articulate anymore, the perfect words that are somehow made imperfect when used to describe her and all that should remain unsaid about her—it is all unsupported by reason. I know that. But that enigmatic calm that attaches itself to people in the presence of reason—it’s something from which I haven’t been able to take comfort, not reliably, not since her. ‘It’s like the smell of burnt toast. You made the toast. You looked forward to it. You even enjoyed making it, but it burned. What were you doing? Was it your fault? It doesn’t matter anymore. You open the window but only the very top layer of the smell goes away. The rest remains
around you. It’s on the walls. You leave the room but it’s on your clothes. You change your clothes but it’s in your hair. It’s on the thin skin on the tops of your hands. And in the morning, it’s still there.’ Now can you imagine it? I am sitting in a large manicured garden at the back of someone’s renovated turn-ofthe-century symbol of success. The sun is getting ready to call it a day but it is still quite warm. I think I can see mosquitoes hovering over the edge of the pool. The outdoor furniture is comfortable even if it is some of the ugliest I have seen. The air is still, so it’s easy for me not to dwell too much on the prospect of the umbrella dislodging from the table and impaling someone. This charming young man is eloquently expressing his quite legitimate doubts about the science or discipline that has brought me to him. He seems to have a fairly common and not necessarily unhealthy antagonism towards his petit-bourgeois father, who it appears has a somewhat authoritarian personality. They don’t understand each other. They value different things but not different enough for the father’s alarm bells to ring hollow with the unemployed aesthete in front of me. It gets to him. But not as much as you do. He’s a romantic, focusing on some idealisation of the past. He could have offered me at least an iced tea but I was getting paid and he was, after all, the kind we dream of: one of the incurably worried-well. He was a little melancholic but not completely without some justification. There was no reason this could not go on for years. I thought he was normal, a bit unhappy—pretty much like everyone. We heard someone walking up the side of the house towards us. Maybe it was more than one person. Suddenly Simon grabbed me, putting his hand over my mouth. He was quite surprisingly strong. There was a hysterical efficiency about him. I thought he was going to kill me. I didn’t say a word. He dragged me behind some bushes near the edge of the garden where we both hid. He seemed to know where to hide, as though he had done it before. I was ready to jettison my first impressions of him. I was now convinced he was psychotic. We looked through the bushes at a man, your husband, entering the house with your son through the back door. It was your house. Simon had meant to show me he was serious about you. He had been to your house many times without anyone ever knowing he was there. Bringing me there was his way of demonstrating that he was willing to take me seriously, or at least try. When your husband and Sam were inside, Simon and I crept out. He took me to the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, opposite the beach. We went in his car. I had never been there before. We have since been there many times. That first evening was my initiation into Simon’s life, the one he has kept hidden from his family. Within an hour I had witnessed a fight, heard a frenetic country singer (‘rockabilly grunge’ he said it was) and someone had tried to sell him what they promised were amphetamines.
I had also been introduced to his friend Angelique. When you left Simon he was angry with you. There was a tremendous sense of betrayal with the shock of your leaving. He could not understand you not wanting to share a common future in which, together, you would observe the world in all its sad and beautiful guises. The way he describes it, you could have been in different rooms and been able to predict the other’s response to something because it would have been your own response. You respected the same things—aesthetically, politically, morally. He felt the two of you were co-conspirators. You wanted the same things and laughed at the same things. But you ultimately needed different things. Simon was a phase. You began to find his optimism, opinions and his touch too predictable and tiresome, stifling. You stopped wearing his t-shirts. You put them back. You pretended to be obtuse. Some nights no one could find you. Where were you? When his father, who never noticed anything, noticed your absence he blamed Simon and then, after a while, so did Simon himself. William was never so warm as he was to you when you had gone, while May would look out on to the street through the venetian blinds as though she was waiting for you. The other sons had gone, all good men too, now with their own silent wives and good jobs, velourclad children and brand new axes to grind. Simon tried to find comfort in his reading but one can only turn so many pages before the anaesthetic wears off. He had hoped the two of you could survive and maybe even correct a few of the world’s imperfections. Perhaps his romanticism was always his biggest problem. Your inexplicable leaving was literally breathtaking. William came home from work one night and found Simon speaking out loud to himself in his bedroom. It was nine years ago. At his desk, he was talking to himself. William stood at the door and listened: And would it have been worth it, after all... To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all’— If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: ‘This is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all?’ For a man so obsessed with words and language, it is interesting that Simon remembers perfectly what it was he was memorising that night but not what was said between him and his father which so quickly led William to strike him. He remembers clearly the seconds before the force of his father’s hand became a very personal heat in his lip and jaw. They said nothing more about it. He also remembers the breeze of his father’s moving hand and the cold of his wedding ring. Not long after, Simon left home. You met your husband at about this time. EXCERPT FROM ‘THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK’, FROM COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962 BY T.S. ELIOT, USED WITH PERMISSION OF FABER AND FABER.
Extracted from Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman. Vintage, 2003. 21
Required Reading Each of these books is vastly different, but they’re all quintessentially Australian. They surprise us, enlighten us and make us feel braver, more connected and wiser than we were before. Whether set at home or abroad, these books have become part of our literary identity and have helped to shape our ideas about ourselves. Here’s an introduction to six essential Modern Australian Classics. How many have you read?
THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH BY RICHARD FLANAGAN (2013)
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai–Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. Inspired by Flanagan’s father’s experiences as a POW, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a savagely beautiful story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth. Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize for the novel in 2014. Chair of the judging panel, Professor A.C. Grayling, labelled the book a masterpiece, adding that the reading experience ‘felt like being kicked in the stomach by several donkeys, all at once’.
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ALL THAT I AM BY ANNA FUNDER (2011)
THE GOLDEN AGE BY JOAN LONDON (2014)
Based on real people and events, All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs, and of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places. The book was published to critical and popular acclaim in the UK (where it was a BBC Book of the Week), and in Australia it won the 2012 Miles Franklin Award. It has now been published in several countries and has attracted much praise for the elevation of its fearless young heroine, Dora. When Hitler comes to power in 1933, a tight-knit group of friends and lovers become hunted outlaws overnight. United in their resistance to the madness and tyranny of Nazism, they flee the country and find refuge in London. But England is not the safe haven they think it is, and a single, chilling act of betrayal will tear them apart.
Subtle, moving and remarkably lovely, Joan London’s The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep connection. The story follows Frank Gold, a thirteen-year-old refugee from wartime Hungary, who is learning to walk again after contracting polio. At the Golden Age Children’s Polio Convalescent Home in Perth, he sees Elsa, a fellow patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond. The book was awarded the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin – among many honours. Author and Sydney Review of Books reviewer Tegan Bennett Daylight commented: ‘[London’s writing] returns you to an early pleasure: the pleasure of story, of wanting to know what happens next… a book that carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become.’
COLLECTION MODERN AUSTRALIAN CLASSICS
TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG BY PETER CAREY (2000)
CLOUDSTREET BY TIM WINTON (1991)
THE BODYSURFERS BY ROBERT DREWE (1983)
Peter Carey’s stunning Man Booker Prize-winning novel about Australia’s most famous outlaw. Ned Kelly’s story in his own words, as channelled through Carey, has been heralded a work of dazzling literary ventriloquism. New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin described the novel as, ‘Triumphantly eclectic, as if Huck Finn and Shakespeare had joined forces to prettify the legend of Jesse James’. As he flees the police, Ned Kelly scribbles his narrative in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose. To his pursuers he is a thief and a murderer. To his own people he’s a hero for opposing the English. True History of the Kelly Gang is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist. There are no sentences like these in all Australian literature, and yet they could only have grown from our soil.
Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday. Since it was first published in 1991, the book has been reimagined as a successful play, a major TV mini-series and an opera, and studied in schools nationwide. After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united and – until God seems to turn his back on their boy Fish – religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords. Chance, hardship and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet. Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives.
Set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach, Robert Drewe’s internationally bestselling collection of short stories inspired film, TV, radio and theatre adaptations. In their vivid evocation of the Australian coast – the scent of suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality, and deep undercurrents of suburban malaise – from first publication these poignant and seductive stories marked a major change in Australian literature. Drewe’s hard-edged realism offered alternative views from the Australian coastal fringe. A Sydney Morning Herald review noted: ‘These stories breathe. Taut yet teeming with life, seductive yet stylistically chaste, they are shot through with gritty phrases that catch at one’s throat.’
ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY IMAGES USED UNDER LICENSE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
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EXTRACT
Idaho BY EMILY RUSKOVICH
VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT. Even without the signs posted on her neighbor’s trees, Ann feels this threat as a border of air as she runs past them, down the mountain. She feels the threat more than ever now that her own home is a place of danger. These acreages she’s trespassing upon now, these acreages she is crossing in her desperation, are unloved, never touched except every few years to repost these awful signs. Great reaches of cheap land on which people huddle in the corners closest to the dirt road in the valley, because to live any farther up would mean trouble in the winter. Acres and acres of land, and yet entire lives are spent within a twentyfoot radius around some trailer. But ownership reaches out from the filthy beds, where bodies are sleeping in the flickers of afternoon TV; it reaches out, a sweeping arm, across every tree and rock contained within its legal—and nevertheless rightful—border, and those trees and rocks become something other than themselves, a history that is the history of the people who claim them; the dark trees are exclusive, conspiratorial. Running as fast as she can down the gulches, through the cold, grasping at branches to keep from falling, her hands burning on the bark they touch, Ann sees that this land they’re all so proud of is worthless. Steep, parched, dusty, and susceptible to fire in the summers, and the summers a reprieve from the winters that define these mountains. She stops to catch her breath, holds some snow up to her cut lip. Her feet are cold and wet. The air is damp. She drops the red snow. She looks down at her freezing hands, and when she looks up again, she sees a different sign, this one hand-painted and posted on a gate between two pines: EMU OIL, SOAP, EGGS. She dabs some snow to her face again, then goes to the gate and opens it. The emu pen runs along the side of a trailer, and back partially into a meadow. One of the tall birds tilts its head and eyes her as she approaches. It lifts its leg and curls its large claw up against its body, as if to ask a question. She sees other emus, off in the trees, moving in their prehistoric way, squalid and regal. Her cut might be deep enough that she needs stitches. 24
Someone will have to take her. She doesn’t know her story yet; she doesn’t know how much she’ll tell. But she’s too cold, too exhausted to think. Already, not even to the porch, she can smell the inside of the trailer. It is a warm, humid smell that hangs around the door, heavy even in the cold. Trailer skirting has been used to form a lean-to against the house, inside of which she sees a bath mat and a dog bowl. She knocks. Almost immediately, a gray-haired woman answers. “I need…” says Ann. But because the face of the woman is not at all alarmed at the sight of the cut on Ann’s face, because she says nothing about it, and instead stands there calmly, all Ann can say is, “I saw the sign on the fence.” The woman nods and motions into her trailer. “Wait here,” she says, then disappears for a moment into another room, and reappears with a handful of toilet paper. She hands it to Ann, and Ann thanks her, as she dabs it to her lip. She does not cry, but feels as if she might, because she is so relieved to have her pain acknowledged by another person, even if the only acknowledgment is a handful of toilet paper. But the woman says nothing about the cut. Instead, she leads Ann through a small kitchen and into the living room. A large man is sitting on a couch watching a television that has been set atop two columns of magazines. There are spots on the wall from water damage and a sick-looking lapdog beats its tail against the ground, lying with its face on the floor, looking up. “Wepshin,” the man scolds, and the little tail stops thumping. The man doesn’t say anything about her face, either, even as she holds the toilet paper against it and feels the paper grow damp as the blood soaks through. At the back of the room, there is a shelf with all of the emu products, and small handwritten signs taped underneath them. “You want jelly you’ll have to come back in the summer. Lots of people come looking for jelly,” says the woman.
“No, no, nothing like that,” says Ann. “I really need to— If you wouldn’t mind—” But the dog has come to the woman’s feet and is whining. The woman kneels down and cups its snout with her hands and says, affectionately, “Oh, I know, I know, you’re getting old.” Then she stands. “The top shelf is the soaps, made with the fat of the bird, lavender grown right outside,” she says, pointing to a window box. “Next shelf is some jerky we smoked ourselves; here are the massage oils, hair oils, bath oils. Well, you can just read the tags. Take your time. My name is Gina.” Gina goes into the kitchen, where it sounds like she is frying giant eggs in bacon fat. Ann feels her hands shaking. She feels something sinister here in this trailer, something that silences her. She doesn’t know what it is. She wants to get out of this place, but she has to think. Where can she go? Holding the toilet paper to her lip, she uses her other hand to pick up a package of soap and looks at the price: ten dollars. Ten dollars? A bottle of bath oil is fifteen. She looks over her shoulder and sees Gina in the other room, hears the crackle and pop of the eggs. The man is still watching sports, the dog’s tail is thumping at Ann’s feet, and she feels that the dog is panting too loudly, so loudly she can
‘Ann feels her hands shaking. She feels something sinister here in this trailer, something that silences her.’
smell its breath. The moisture, the filth of the air settles down on her skin, and she wants to get away. She realizes the feeling of chaos is coming from a constant buzzing sound. It grows loud, then quiets. The shelf that holds the emu products, she notices, is placed in such a way that it creates a very small room behind it. Ann steps around the shelf and looks into this dim space the size of a closet. And there, in a strange glow of light, is a boy. He is about ten years old. He leans forward over a table. The buzzing is coming from something in his hand. She looks more closely. It is a kind of pen with a vibrating needle at its tip. The pen is attached to a cord that disappears into a small black box with many dials, which in turn is plugged into the wall. She sees the back of the boy’s head, the white scar in his short hair, the hole in his thin red shirt, just below his neck. On the table in front of him is a giant eggshell, green and teal and white, lying on top of a thin light box on the table. He is using the pen to carve a picture. She can’t see what the picture is, just the light caught in the threadlike lines. All around him are other eggs with pictures carved into them, elaborate forest scenes, mountain lions, bears. They are beautiful, astonishingly so. The boy sees Ann but does not turn to look at her. He focuses on his shell and the buzzing goes on, as if Ann isn’t there at all. “Hello?” she whispers. He mumbles something she can’t hear over the buzzing of his pen. He is carving a girl’s face. This face is surrounded by an elaborate mosaic of trees, so that the tangles of the girl’s hair become the branches, the sharp moon in the sky a trinket in her hair. The trees are dark and teal, and the girl is white. His needle is shaping the delicate curves of her jaw. “Is that the one you want?” Suddenly Gina is behind her, her arms crossed, a black spatula in her hand. “I hadn’t thought. I don’t know,” says Ann. “Buzzy’s prices, not mine. Tell her.” The boy turns off the pen, gives Ann a long, bored look, his jaw hanging open. “Faces are eighty, flowers sixty, mountains seventy,” he says quickly, as if the effort of saying it is too much. Ann shakes her head. “Out of your range?” says Gina coldly. “I don’t have enough. It’s not why I’m here.” “You don’t have anything. Nothing but some cold feet and a cut on your face.” Ann begins to cry. “No,” she says, but she feels dizzy. The dark room tilts ever so slightly in her vision. “My husband is in trouble,” she manages. But the boy turns his pen back on. He drills through the hard shell to make the pupil of the girl’s eye, her pupil the absence of a pupil, a hole in the center of her teal iris through which the light box shines out its yellow light. He wipes the shell dust away with his dirty hand. 25
“I have to go,” Ann says, “I have to go.” She hurries out of the trailer, nearly tripping on the sick dog, and then nearly tripping again on the rotten porch. It is snowing now. Gina yells after her, “Shut the gate!” but Ann doesn’t comprehend these words until long after she is through that gate. She doesn’t know what she is frightened of, but she doesn’t stop running, feeling as she goes that her limbs are not her own, that she is missing from her body, that she is caught here in the snow and the confusion of someone else’s life. Wade had told her once, not the day on the ocean, but a different day, when he hardly meant to tell her at all, that he was the one the officers arrested. He said that he stopped at the first farmhouse he came to. He didn’t pull up the driveway; he stopped in the middle of the main road, and he got out and ran. But there had been so much confusion when the police arrived that they did not know who to question. They pushed him against the truck and put handcuffs on him, and he didn’t fight it. They did this even though Jenny was down on her knees on the gravel road, blood on her clothes. The old woman from the farmhouse was kneeling beside her, hugging her, trying to get her to calm down. The officers
‘The police could not understand. They thought he had lost his mind, that he was pleading to get back not to a place but to a time…’
didn’t know what to do with the truck where May was. Nobody thought to move the truck, so it stayed there in the middle of the road. It was Wade’s protests that he had to return to his little girl, the one who had lived, that delayed everything. The police could not understand. They thought he had lost his mind, that he was pleading to get back not to a place but to a time, to where his daughter was still alive, as if May herself were waiting up there in the moments before the hatchet came down. When Jenny confessed, softly (Ann imagines), after trying to get their attention, for no one had noticed her much at first, with the child in the backseat and the man pleading to “get back” to his daughter on the mountain, all she said was, “I did this.” They still did not take the handcuffs off Wade. Maybe because he didn’t ask them to; he asked for only one thing, to go back for his other daughter, and they didn’t, they couldn’t, understand. When they finally realized he was talking about a second girl, two police officers drove up Mount Loeil with Wade in the backseat. He said nothing the whole way except where to turn. They did not know then that June was lost. It had not occurred to Wade that she would not want to be found by him, and so they did not call for the bloodhounds or the search team until a full hour later, when they arrived in the clearing where a few crows were sunning themselves on the halfhearted pile of birch, and found June gone. They searched everywhere, calling June’s name, crushing the white Styrofoam cups with their black boots. And when the search team finally arrived, the bloodhounds sniffed Wade’s deerskin glove. Why, if it was your glove, not hers? asked Ann. Because June had put it on earlier that day, as a joke. How funny her little hands looked in her father’s giant gloves. That was the hardest thing for him to tell her; Ann could see that in his face, grief-stricken, but no tears. June’s joke about her hand in his gloves. But he remembered it because he needed to. Because there was no article of June’s clothing in the truck. Because the bloodhounds needed something to sniff and so he found something for them on the edge of his memory. But maybe his own hands had covered up her smell already, because the hounds chased false trails down steep gulches and through streams. And later, when pictures of June’s face appeared on flyers in grocery stores and gas stations, no one seemed to see her even when they looked. Only Ann and Wade, for whom the faces of other children took on, for a flash, the shape of June’s. Pictures in magazines, library flyers, advertisements. Any indistinct resemblance, any slight hint at the curve of a nose, and there she was: in a passing car, in a commercial, or in the webs of light shining through the fissures in a carving on an egg. Extracted from Idaho by Emily Ruskovich. Chatto & Windus, February 2017.
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CLASSIC THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
‘While Poe is wandering away from his usual domain of black cats and ghostly chamber door-tappings… he isn’t going far.’ Candice Fox
Now and Then READING INTO THE PAST
ILLUSTRATION: CEOL RYDER
Number-one New York Times bestseller Candice Fox is the new queen of Australian crime writing. In her 2017 thriller, Crimson Lake, the threads of multiple crimes converge in steamy, croc-infested Far North Queensland. When asked to share a favourite classic book, she’s returned to a master craftsman: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
If you ask me, Edgar Allan Poe doesn’t get enough credit these days for the daring and revolutionary steps he took into crime with The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He’s become the poster boy of despondent, vampire-idolising teens and edgy high-school nerds, and I worry that those cranky types might be hogging him; that through the horror-heavy commercialisation of Poe, his genre-defining detective fiction gets forgotten. There has been a little resurgence of Poe’s image lately via the hipster movement – I see his weirdly bulbous head printed on tote bags in the ‘bookish things’ sections of Dymocks among stuffed-toy renditions of Freud. You can get a decidedly sleep-deprived portrait of Poe on socks and t-shirts and in the form
of ‘wacky wobblers’ you can put on the dashboard of the battered Commodore station wagon you and your mates did up like a hearse. Poe was into scary stuff but I think even he would be terrified by all this. I’m not judging. I was one of those vampy nerds, so yes, I did memorise ‘The Raven’ while on break from churning out huge manuscripts filled with very Lestat-like beaus. But I ran across The Murders in the Rue Morgue eventually, and it was a brilliant transitional piece for me – a bridge between two very dark worlds. Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin uses pre-Sherlock deduction techniques (or ‘ratiocination’) to all but read minds, and the preternatural leanings don’t stop there. Dupin is a lover of the night, claims to be able to see into people’s souls, laughs softly, darkly,
even menacingly, and shows glimmers of two men housed in a single being, ‘one who coldly put things together, and another who just as coldly took them apart’. While Poe is wandering away from his usual domain of black cats and ghostly chamber door-tappings in this shadowy tome, he isn’t going far. Murders sets up crime fiction conventions that would outlast Poe, with unreliable witnesses and red herrings in abundance, climbing to a suitably quirky twist. It’s essential reading for crime fanatics, misanthropic emos and those who just like to hear people scream. The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1841. 27
RECIPE PHILLIPPA’S HOME BAKING
Date Espresso Loaf Try this delicious recipe from Phillippa’s Home Baking – the perfect partner for your mid-morning cuppa.
INGREDIENTS 130g dates, pitted and chopped 190ml hot, strong coffee 1 tablespoon dark rum 1 egg 160g caster sugar 15g butter, melted 90g pecans, roughly chopped 170g plain flour ½ teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda Whole pecans, extra, to decorate Unsalted butter, to serve (optional)
METHOD
In a small bowl, soak the dates in the hot coffee and rum for at least 30 minutes. TIP: Natural vanilla essence can be substituted for the rum, if preferred. Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan. Line the base of a 21.5cm × 11.5cm loaf tin with baking paper and butter and flour the sides. Place the egg and sugar in a large bowl and whisk until thick and pale. Stir in the butter and chopped pecans. Place the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda in a large bowl and mix with a whisk. Fold the dry ingredients alternately with the dates and their soaking liquid into the pecan mixture, a third at a time. Take care not to over-mix. Pour the batter into the tin and decorate the top of the cake with a line of extra pecans. Bake on the centre shelf of the oven for 40–45 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and rest in the tin for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely. The cake will keep in an airtight container for up to 5 days. Recipe extracted from Phillippa’s Home Baking by Phillippa Grogan and Richard Cornish. Penguin, March 2017.
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PHOTO: CATHIE GLASSBY
SERVES 8–10
COLLECTION AUTUMN READING
End Notes Autumn’s here. Memories of summer days give way to promises of long winter nights. This transitional season’s a great time to plan ahead, get your house in order and stash away some books worth sinking your teeth into. Told with ingenuity, authenticity and flair, here are five stories from five authors daring readers to consider some big questions.
WHITE TEARS BY HARI KUNZRU
Carter and Seth are worlds apart – one a trust fund hipster, the other a suburban nobody – yet united by their love of music. Rising fast on the New York scene, one day they stumble across an old blues song long forgotten by history, and everything starts to unravel. Carter’s obsession with the unknown singer draws him down a path that allows no return, and Seth has no choice but to follow his friend into the darkness.
ILLUSTRATION: ZOË CARACATSANOUDIS
THE IDIOT BY ELIF BATUMAN
September 1995: Selin, a TurkishAmerican college freshman from New Jersey, is about to embark on her first year at Harvard University, determined to decipher the mysteries of language and to become a writer. In between studying, teaching English to a Costa Rican plumber, and befriending a Serbian refugee from Connecticut, Selin falls in love with a Hungarian maths student
in her Russian class. Then while teaching English to village children during summer in the Hungarian countryside, sad and comic misunderstandings ensue. EXIT WEST BY MOHSIN HAMID
In a city swollen by refugees, Saeed and Nadia try not to notice the sound of bombs getting closer every night, the radio announcing new laws, the public executions… Rumours are spreading of strange black doors across the city, doors that lead to London or San Francisco, Greece or Dubai. One day soon the time will come for Nadia and Saeed to seek out one such door, joining the great outpouring of those fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world. THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES BY JOHN BOYNE
Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a
well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world. His only anchor, a heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamorous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself, struggling to discover his home, his country and his identity. HOMEGOING BY YAA GYASI
Effia and Esi: two sisters; one sold into slavery; one a slave trader’s wife. The consequences of their fates reverberate through the generations that follow. From the Gold Coast of Africa to a cotton-picking plantation in Mississippi, from a village missionary school to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, Homegoing is the intense, heartbreaking story of one family – and through their lives the very story of America itself. 29
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