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ISSUE THREE: JUNE 2017
underline For the love of reading
John Safran Enter Depends What You Mean by Extremist : John Safran’s startling account of going rogue with Australia’s deplorables.
IN THIS ISSUE: JOAN LONDON | ROBERT DESSAIX | HOWARD JACOBSON | MURAKAMI
In This Issue Stranger in a Strange Land John Safran steps behind the lines of Australian extremism
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Depends What You Mean by Extremist An extract from John Safran’s journey to the heart of ‘real’ Australia
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Editorial Director Ellie Morrow
Dreaming Awake The ethereal worlds of Haruki Murakami
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Production Manager Lulu Mason
Considered Brushstrokes A guide to Joan London’s remarkable career to date
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The Golden Age An extract from Joan London’s 2014 novel
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Cheating Time Robert Dessaix ponders travelling as leisure
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Shakespeare Revisited The Hogarth series redefining timeless storytelling
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New Boy An extract from Tracy Chevalier’s take on Othello
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Dirty Words Pussy by Howard Jacobson – a timely satirical romp
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Now and Then Kate Forsyth on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
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Publisher Penguin Random House Australia Editor / Chief Copywriter Samson McDougall
Publication Design Cathie Glassby Printer Proudly in partnership with Adams Print
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If you have any questions or comments, write to us at underline@penguinrandomhouse.com.au penguin.com.au
Recipe 28 Witchetty Grub Kebabs End Notes Collected winter reading
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COVER PHOTO: MATT COLLINS
Underline Issue Three: June 2017
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.
BOOKS FEATURED IN UNDERLINE ARE AVAILABLE AT ALL GOOD BOOKSTORES
INTERVIEW JOHN SAFRAN
Stranger in a Strange Land By Samson McDougall
The year the extreme became the mainstream, John Safran put himself out there to test the pulse of ‘ordinary’ Australia. From drinking shots with nationalists to gobbling falafel with radicals, Depends What You Mean by Extremist is his confronting portrait of contemporary Australia.
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nationalists, ISIS supporters, anarchists, fundamentalists and stirrers. And it’s a world where ideologies are riddled with contradiction, misinformation and general confusion. ‘Everything’s just exhausting to talk about because everything’s a mess,’ Safran says. Ideas of religion are jumbled with ethnicity are jumbled with race; religious texts are co-opted to sell modern agendas; histories are rewritten; unreliable narrators abound and radical views are disguised as ideas palatable to a broad audience. But comedy emerges in the most unlikely places. And this is where Safran looked when making decisions about the shape his story would take. ‘I really trust irony and humour,’ he says. ‘If something’s funny or ironic it must be saying something. I tried not to get too hung up on why; I might not have even worked it out.’ His innate sense of the weird enabled Safran to gravitate towards situations that exposed the insanity of the world he was exploring. One such situation he recounts is meeting a Muslim man at anti-Islam group United Patriots Front’s post-rally party in Bendigo. ‘I kind of just feel it,’ he says. ‘I feel that it’s weird and funny in a way. I’m having these insane conversations with people and saying “how can you be UPF and anti-Islam but now we’re at the after-party and I find out one of the UPF people is married to a Muslim immigrant?”. I feel the madness of that, not as a journalist but maybe as an artist. It’s so wild! But if you tried to explain that to me, why that is interesting… I don’t know. ‘I was so driven by the emotional energy of things. So I tried to hang out with the people where I felt this kind of disorienting energy, way more than trying to intellectually tick boxes about saying this or that.’ At times, following this energy led Safran into confronting, even threatening
‘I really trust irony and humour. If something’s funny or ironic it must be saying something.’
PHOTOS: MATT COLLINS
John Safran’s second book, Depends What You Mean by Extremist, is just out and he’s feeling on edge. But this nervousness extends well beyond the average author’s anxieties over how their book will be received. For one, being Safran, he’s running heavy subject matter – ethnicity, race, extremism, identity and religion – through his distinctive comedic filter. There will no doubt be people less than impressed with his shtick. And Extremist is also a homecoming, of sorts. Following his breakout success with 2013 true-crime story Murder in Mississippi, this is Safran’s debut voyage into the heart of ‘real’ Australia. As a well-known urban middle-class Jew, it’s been suggested the story of grassroots everyday Australian extremism is not Safran’s to tell. But after years of feeling pigeonholed as an outsider at home, he couldn’t resist being swept up in the commotion. Exploring the strangeness of the world has formed the backbone of Safran’s material as a writer, broadcaster and comedian. It all started in his mid-twenties. After dabbling in multiple creative pursuits, while working as a copywriter, Safran won a spot on ABC TV show Race Around the World, making mini-documentaries about his experiences abroad. ‘I realised there was something interesting about being a fish out of water all the time,’ he says. ‘There was something interesting about pushing my own little story on a bigger world. Things just came alive as soon as I superimposed a bit of comedy on the real world, and I’ve been doing that ever since.’ Growing up Jewish in Melbourne, Safran says conversations about racism were always at a simmer. And as a kid, all the religious symbolism, ideas of fascism and firsthand accounts of escaping the Nazis offered glimpses into fascinating grown-up worlds. Safran’s natural curiosity was further fuelled by his father, Alex, who drip-fed snippets of information about secret societies that existed in Melbourne’s dark corners. This was preinternet: googling for more information wasn’t an option. ‘There’s the whole taboo, secretive nature of racism,’ he says. ‘I kind of like digging around in secretive worlds. I remember my dad telling me about this bookshop in the city that was run by right-wing people. So I went up there one time after school and went into this little room and they had these stale photocopied little magazines and stuff; it was so strange.’ From the opening lines of Extremist, readers are transported to a version of Australia both familiar and bizarre. Expecting skinheads, Safran arrives at a Reclaim Australia rally in Melbourne to find the anti-immigration, anti-Islam movement is far more multicultural than he expected. From here he unravels several spools of thread to expose the mother of all tangles that is extremism in Australia. It’s a frightening world, occupied by white
ARTICLE SUBJECT
‘I tried to hang out with the people where I felt this kind of disorienting energy, way more than trying to intellectually tick boxes about saying this or that.’
situations. He says, though, the idea of what threat an individual poses can be more intimidating than the person in the flesh. ‘When people threaten me online or talk about me online, I found that a lot more scary than when I’d be in the streets with them,’ he says. ‘Online you can create any story in your head about who they are and how much power they have, but as soon as you meet them or you hang with them in the real world then those possibilities get a bit smaller.’ Safran says he couldn’t help but consider the reactions 6
of his worst enemies while drafting the book. And he was annoyed that the detractors in his mind, and Messenger feed, would think he’s not the right person to be telling the story. ‘There was this stuff popping up online about me turning up at these rallies as a white person, and this stuff started to hang over me a bit when I was writing,’ he says. ‘It’s so stupid because it’s just a half dozen people… It’s kind of weird how you start focusing in on such a minor part of the community who start digging into your brain.’ He knew his version of this story could never be wrapped up in neat bundles and packaged as ‘the definitive guide to extremism in Australia’, simply because he’s not qualified. But given the upswell of the right that we’ve seen in the second coming of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and world events like Brexit and the unexpected US election result, the way Safran saw it maybe an Australian creating a portrait of a time and place is enough. ‘I feel like an Australian,’ he says. ‘Even though there are specifics about my Jewish upbringing – Yeshiva College and Carlisle Street [St Kilda East] – I think that’s a reflection of so many Australians who have their own versions of that. One of the things I was happy about doing was getting out there in Australia and throwing myself into these archetypal Australian situations. I had fun out there. People didn’t seem to hate me or anything. It seemed to work out well… I feel like a musician who’s been out with my guitar and has come back to play the song of what I saw.’
PHOTO © SBS/SARAH ENTICKNAP
Safran at an anti-Islam versus anti-racism protest in Coburg, Melbourne, May 2016.
EXTRACT
Depends What You Mean by Extremist BY JOHN SAFRAN
From the very beginnings of John Safran’s examination of extremism in Australia, he found the far-right to be more culturally diverse than expected. Pastor Daniel Nalliah is a Sri Lankan immigrant whose church, Catch The Fire Ministries, is part of the sprawl that makes up the Reclaim Australia movement. In this extract from Depends What You Mean by Extremist, Safran accepts an invitation from the pastor to attend a church event with a difference. ZION
Pastor Daniel’s name starts flashing on my phone. As if he knew I’d settled into thinking the movement is antiSemitic, he tells me that Catch The Fire Ministries is hosting a special Jewish event this Sunday morning. He invites me along. I’m assuming that by ‘Jewish event’ he doesn’t mean anti-Jewish event. But he does endorse the UPF [United Patriots Front]. Of course I have to go. The church is forty minutes up a highway I’m never on, in a direction I never go. The Age awarded Hallam the distinction of ‘Melbourne’s least liveable suburb of 2011’. The colour palette in this semi-industrial zone stretches from cement-grey to asphalt-grey. Inside Catch The Fire Ministries, however, vivid colours fly everywhere. Congregants rush up and down the aisles with flags, some emblazoned with crowns. It’s incredibly multicul— multiethnic! White families are mixed in here too. Behind the band, on the stage, hangs the Australian flag. Well, a version of it. Prayer hands are printed on the flag along with the Union Jack and Southern Cross. (Later, a friend argues that the addition of prayer hands is, technically speaking, flag desecration. Indeed, Pastor Daniel’s efforts to be Australia’s most patriotic citizen sometimes produce ‘un-Australian’ quirks. At rallies he holds his hand on his heart during the national anthem, something his Anglo companions there don’t do, and nor would the governor-general. It isn’t the Australian custom.) One more flag is worth noting. The Israeli one hangs over a lectern on the stage. Just as Pastor Daniel is more Australian than the Australians, he’s more Zionistic than the Jews. I’ve never seen an Israeli flag in a synagogue.
‘We all actually keep all of the Jewish feasts,’ a regular whispers in my ear. ‘It reminds us where we come from.’ The cultural mash-ups are only just beginning. This week also sees a Jewish festival in which Jews eat under a sukkah, a structure roofed in palm leaves. The entire point of the sukkah is that it’s assembled outdoors so you can look through the leaves to the stars. Catch The Fire has built theirs indoors, so you can only look through to the fluorescent lights. I hope I don’t sound like a jerk. I love a cultural mash-up. Buy a bagel and fill it with ham today. ‘I’ll ask my brother from Uganda to come and pray,’ Pastor Daniel announces from the Israeli-flag-draped lectern. ‘Hallelujah!’ the Ugandan man, who’s sporting a goatie but no hair, rasps at the rainbow coalition of congregants. Several hundred folks have turned up this Sunday morning. ‘We pray for the salvation of Israel!’ the Ugandan man cries. The organ moans in the background. ‘It all started with God promising Abraham the covenant. From chapter seventeen of Genesis: “I assign the land you sojourn in. To you and your offspring to come. All the land!”’ The Ugandan is shaking and weeping. I’m worried he’s peaked too early. ‘Lord, You make a covenant,’ he wails. ‘A bigger covenant was made when Christ died for that land. No one can break that! Not the UN!’ ‘No!’ shouts the congregation, a drum now beating over the organ. ‘Not Obama! Not Pope Francis! Not the demons, nor the Devil himself!’ 7
‘I want to run up that staircase and burst into the office more than anything. More than fourteen-year-old me wanted to break into that Freemasons’ hall to find out all their secrets.’
The Ugandan man drops to his knees. (I was wrong to fear he’d peaked too early.) ‘I will thank You, Lord, for the IDF! The Israel Defense Forces!’ This is way more entertaining than synagogue. ‘Hallelujah!’ wails the congregation. His prayer over, the sweaty Ugandan is led off like he’s James Brown. I think about Pastor Daniel’s dictum: immigrants must assimilate to the Australian way. Sure, Pastor. Because there’s nothing more ’strayan than dropping to your knees and weeping to Christ for the IDF. I imagine Dennis Lillee is doing this right now. ‘Look!’ A Chinese woman has now taken the stage and thrusts a giant bible at us. ‘This is the land title. This is the formal title for the land of Israel! Nobody can dispute that.’ I’m reminded of Hamza, the Australian ISIS supporter I’ve been hanging with, and his Qur’an – if it’s in the book, that’s that. ‘Lord, we thank You,’ the Chinese woman goes on. ‘This Yom Kippur, the Palestinian young boy who doesn’t know God, and the love of God, wanted to bomb Israel and the bomb detonated in his hands!’ The congregation ‘Hallelujah!’s this news of the blownup Palestinian. Now Pastor Daniel walks back to the lectern and calls up a very special guest. A man blessed with an impressive walrus moustache, and a Jewish skullcap, struts to the stage. 8
‘My name is Jonathan. I am from America. I’m a living miracle. I ought to be dead many times over.’ That was Pastor Daniel’s opener back in Mildura – that he ought to be dead. Jonathan, born Jewish, walks us through his downfall. As a young man he screwed up his big break in a Disney World a cappella group by forgetting his words. He fell into a funk, overdosed on cocaine and found Jesus. Now, he tells us, he is a Messianic Jew. That group’s logic: the Torah mentions a Messiah, so why can’t that be Jesus? And therefore, why can’t you believe in Jesus and still remain a Jew? This is heretical to most Jews, who see Jesus as a false Messiah. Religious Jews from my school would throw rocks through the window of the local Messianic Jewish synagogue. They were the ultimate traitors in my schoolmates’ eyes. ‘Hava nagila… Hava nagila,’ Jonathan croons as he swaggers across the stage with a lounge-singer arrangement of the Jewish classic. A Chinese man in the congregation springs to his feet, whipping out a shofar, a ram’s horn. In a synagogue, a rabbi solemnly blows the shofar on holy occasions, producing a few mournful bleats. This Chinese man is somehow blasting out ‘Hava Nagila’ like he’s Charlie Parker. Is this why Pastor Daniel invited me? To show I could accept Jesus and still be a Jew? Next, the Jewish lounge singer who believes in Jesus
belts out the rabbinical classic ‘Moshiah! Moshiah! Moshiah!’ while Filipinos, Maoris, Nigerians, and Anglos too, leap to the front and dance in circles like Chassidic Jews. Just as I’m thinking this is peak cultural mash-up, Blair Cottrell strides into the church. The UPF leader and Hitler enthusiast has walked into this multiethnic celebration of all things Jewish. I can’t believe my luck. Blair is accompanied by a blond woman with handguns printed on her yoga pants. He’s trying to find a seat, but the Ugandan is pulling his sleeve, trying to coax him into Jewish dancing. Blair blushes, and with a smile politely pulls away. He and Handgun Yoga Pants sit next to Pastor Daniel. Blair nods a hello to me. I don’t know why he’s here. He’s mentioned he’s not a Christian in one of his Facebook videos. Jonathan has taken a break from crooning, but the band pounds on. One young dancing woman, overcome with the spirit, has collapsed. A blanket is thrown over her body – for ‘modesty’, I’m told. Other blankets are stored along the wall, so collapsing congregants must happen a bit here. Ten minutes later, the Chassidic dancing winds down but the organ keeps burbling through the speakers. Jonathan is back at the lectern. ‘The spirit of antiSemitism is alive today in the Church,’ he cries. ‘You guys don’t need it. It will keep you from knowing Jesus and who he really is. I would just recommend that you take this opportunity right now – today – to come up here and to ask God to forgive that spirit and get rid of it!’ The churchgoers rise and file up the aisles. Jonathan lays his hands on them, one by one, and prays to drive the spirit of anti-Semitism out of them. I find it difficult to believe that all these Maori and Chinese people are possessed by such hatred. Meanwhile, the one guy who might need such an exorcism – the guy who wanted a picture of Hitler in every classroom – sits and fidgets with his car keys. Pastor Daniel drops to his knees, squeezes his eyes shut and mumbles to God. Did he invite Blair along for this? To try to drive the demon of anti-Semitism out of his soul? More congregants collapse, more blankets are thrown. I fall into a conversation with the Chinese shofar virtuoso. When I turn my head back I see two empty chairs. Pastor Daniel and Blair have disappeared! Where to? Handgun Yoga Pants is still here. I scan the room and spot Pastor Daniel and Blair ascending a staircase at the back of the church. The staircase leads to the pastor’s office. What are they up to? I’m antsy as hell. I want to run up that staircase and burst into the office more than anything. More than fourteen-year-old me wanted to break into that Freemasons’ hall to find out all their secrets. I loiter near the sukkah. A middle-aged woman tells me I have to see the Australian World War I epic The Lighthorsemen. ‘It was God’s plan,’ she says of the
battle the film is based on. ‘He used Australians to set Beersheba free, to put up the British flag after – eight hundred years, was it? I don’t know. It was a long time that the Turks had Ottoman rule.’ I’ve never heard Australian history told through the filter of religious miracles. Blair and Pastor Daniel return but will reveal nothing about their absence. ‘Come,’ Blair says to Handgun Yoga Pants, and the two are soon out the door. Pastor Daniel senses I’ve been thrown by Blair’s dropin. He leans over to me and claims that when he met the UPF boys they were filled with hatred, but he’s been steering them in the right direction. I ask him if he’s heard of Blair’s plan to place a photo of Hitler in every classroom. He says, unconvincingly, he doesn’t know anything about that. Outside, turning the keys in my car, I remember a Triple J Hottest 100 broadcast, one Australia Day. We the DJs pressed the buttons and spun the tunes from a stage in a park. In our dreams – and those of Triple J management, too – we would be looking out at multicultural Australia. That’s who we wanted our audience to be, but most of the thousands of faces staring up at us were white. Every Melbourne institution, from the Melbourne Theatre Company to the Melbourne Writers Festival, would kill for Pastor Daniel’s ethnically diverse crowd. They hold meetings (I’ve been to some of them) where they brainstorm how to draw a ‘less white’ demographic. Hey guys, ring Pastor Daniel for tips! Only catch is, they don’t like the Muslims. I zoom back down the freeway sniggering like Muttley. By the time I’m home, the Case of the Disappearing Hitler Enthusiast up the Staircase is solved. Blair has uploaded a new video. He stands next to Pastor Daniel in his Catch The Fire Ministries office. The office features an ornamental crucifix so large you could perform an actual crucifixion on it. ‘In light of Australia’s second terror attack,’ Blair begins, referring to the fatal shooting two days ago of a police worker in Sydney, ‘it’s more important than ever that we stand up for our way of life. Next weekend, the UPF will be holding its biggest rally to date.’ So this is an ad for that global rally against Islam. ‘Yes,’ Pastor Daniel pipes in, ‘I want to encourage everyone who’s watching this – walk with me for the next generation. This is not a rally that is racist, no. Look at me. Look at Blair. We are… we are our nation. If you have a problem with that, go back to where you came from.’ He and Blair give a thumbs-up to the camera. Travelling through the walls of Pastor Daniel’s office I can hear the faint crooning of the Messianic Jew.
Extracted from Depends What You Mean by Extremist by John Safran. Hamish Hamilton, May 2017. 9
COLLECTION HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dreaming Awake This May, Japanese literary giant Haruki Murakami released a dazzling new selection of short stories, Men Without Women. Across seven tales, he brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Marked by the same wry humour that has defined his entire body of work, there are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. 10
Murakami’s novels have been translated into more than 50 languages. The international accolades he has amassed – among them several honorary doctorates, the Jerusalem, Catalunya and Franz Kafka Prizes, and Hans Christian Anderson Award – reflect the global impact of his largely surrealist body of work. Of this international appeal, on his website he says, ‘I think people who share my dreams can enjoy reading my novels. And that’s a wonderful thing… Myths are like a
reservoir of stories, and if I can act as a similar kind of “reservoir”, albeit a modest one, that would make me very happy.’ Here we score five Murakami novels against our highly scientific ‘Surreal’ scale. Telekinesis and a storm of fish rate quite highly, a sky of two moons falls mid-range, while the voyage of discovery of a middleaged man sits at the lower end of the scale. Bonus points were awarded for cats.
ILLUSTRATIONS: CATHIE GLASSBY
Surrealism on a sliding scale – five shades of Haruki Murakami.
‘I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.’ Haruki Murakami
THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE
The book that cemented his literary credibility, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is Murakami at his best. At its heart, it’s a detective story, but the interplay of the metaphysical, political and personal means that it defies easy categorisation, just as its ending defies easy explanation. COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE
SURREAL FACTOR: 4/5; AM I DREAMING?
Haunted by an unexplained childhood betrayal, Tsukuru Tazaki embarks on a mission to confront the mystery of his colourless existence. A return to the lyrical realism that made Murakami famous, you won’t find any overt surrealism here, but the author’s feather-light touch gives the book an ethereal quality.
KAFKA ON THE SHORE
SURREAL FACTOR: 2/5; OUT OF THE ORDINARY SUBTLETIES NORWEGIAN WOOD
Norwegian Wood is an elegant, understated novel of young love and loss. The protagonist, Toru, reminisces about his college relationships during the upheaval of the late-sixties student movement. One-hundred per cent realist, Norwegian Wood is the book that catapulted Murakami to stardom in Japan. SURREAL FACTOR: 1/5; THE MAGIC OF THE EVERYDAY
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Almost a literary riddle, Kafka on the Shore is equally maddening and brilliant. In alternating chapters, we follow a young boy searching for his mother and sister, and an old man who finds lost cats. It sounds straightforward enough, but this strange and captivating novel is dizzying, bewildering and wonderful. SURREAL FACTOR: 5/5; A KAFKAESQUE INKBLOT TEST
Arguably Murakami’s magnum opus, this trilogy of novels about alternate realities, sinister cults and a literary prodigy is an extraordinary read, and despite its imposing size, a great place to start with Murakami. SURREAL FACTOR: 3/5; OTHERWORLDLY BUT ACCESSIBLE
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A GUIDE TO... JOAN LONDON
Considered Brushstrokes A walk through the remarkable career so far of one of Australia’s most beloved authors, Joan London.
‘Stubborn, slow and meticulous’ is how Joan London describes her writing practice. ‘Once I have an idea,’ she says, ‘I can feel like a dog with a bone; burying it, digging it up again, never letting go.’ This considered word craft dictates that hers will not be a career measured in terms of volume. But during the 31 years since her first collection of short stories, 12
Sister Ships, was published, unanimous praise for her writing has paid tribute to the depth, insightfulness and significance of every work. In 2015, London was awarded the Patrick White Award for her outstanding contribution to Australian literature. The judges described her work as ‘quiet, poetic prose [that] opens up worlds, both
real and imagined, of travel, desire, loss and love’, adding, ‘[her] nomadic characters travel through space and time affirming through their relationships and varied histories a global humanity.’ Upon receiving the prize, in an interview with the Guardian, she said, ‘It’s an award that has always intrigued me, embodying, it seems to me, the deepest values of
‘Sometimes I sense a unifying sort of mentality behind my writing – certain obsessions, or types of characters can seem only too familiar.’
AUTHOR PHOTO: ABBY LONDON
Joan London
Patrick White himself, who knew all about the highs and lows of the writing life, the anxiety and doubts that only solid, daily hours of application can help overcome.’ In the same year, London was named a Western Australian State Living Treasure, and her latest novel, The Golden Age, was awarded the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin – among many honours. Of the book, author and Sydney Review of Books’ reviewer Tegan Bennett Daylight commented: ‘Her writing, which calls attention to itself only by its precision, gives you an opportunity, the way silence sometimes does, to reflect productively. Best of all, it returns you to an early pleasure: the pleasure of story, of wanting to know what happens next.’ Asked to reflect on her body of work so far, London says, ‘Sometimes I sense a unifying sort of mentality behind my writing – certain obsessions, or types of characters can seem only too familiar. But I rarely look back, it makes me feel a bit squeamish. However, because I am a slow writer, I can feel surprised that the number of books does increase over the years.’ Here we introduce Joan London’s stories so far, and offer the first few chapters of The Golden Age as a taste of her capacity for compassion, mastery of composition and incomparable grace.
GILGAMESH 2001
The epic story of a mother’s search for the father of her child – from Australia to Armenia via England and Mesopotamia – all under the shadow of the imminent, and soon to be very real, Second World War. Gilgamesh is a portrayal of the different journeys we choose to take through life and what happens when ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary, seismic events. THE NEW DARK AGE 2004
A young singer runs into the desert of gold rush Kalgoorlie; Chagall comes to Paris in the twenties; a hippie couple survey their ideals as Whitlam is deposed; a middle-aged man looks at his life after cancer on the eve of the new millennium… The New Dark Age encompasses fourteen luminous stories taken from London’s award-winning collections Sister Ships (1986) and Letter to Constantine (1994), spanning the twentieth century in a volume that showcases her storytelling at its very best. THE GOOD PARENTS 2008
Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from the West, comes to live in Melbourne and starts an affair with her boss, the enigmatic Maynard Flynn, whose wife is dying of cancer.
When Maya’s parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive to stay with her, they are told by her housemate that Maya has gone away and no one knows where. As Toni and Jacob wait and search for Maya in Melbourne, everything in their lives is brought into question. They recall the yearning and dreams, the betrayals and choices of their pasts – choices with unexpected and irrevocable consequences. With Maya’s disappearance, the lives of all those close to her come into focus, to reveal the complexity of the ties that bind us to one another, to parents, children, siblings, friends and lovers. THE GOLDEN AGE 2014
It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia. 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 Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs: love and desire, music, death, and poetry. It is a place where children must learn they’re alone, even within their families. A story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life, The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep connection. 13
EXTRACT
The Golden Age BY JOAN LONDON
LIGHT
One afternoon during rest-time, the new boy, Frank Gold, left his bed, lowered himself into his wheelchair and glided down the corridor. There was nobody around. It was early December, already hot, and Frank, veteran by now of hospital life, knew the nurses would be upstairs in front of their fan. The door to Sister Penny’s office was closed: she’d be catching forty winks on her couch. His first goal, as usual, was to set eyes on Elsa. He peered into Girls through the crack between the hinges of the halfopen door. Elsa’s bed was behind the door. He liked to see her face asleep. Even if her head was turned away into the pillow, the sight of her thick gold-brown plait somehow gave him hope. But this afternoon her bed was empty. He rolled on, past the silent kitchen with its bare, scrubbed benches. Even the flies were sleeping. It was as if the whole place were under a spell. Only he had escaped… He’d been waiting for this moment. In his pocket was a cigarette and a little sheaf of matches, stolen from his mother during her last visit. She’d slipped off to have a word with Sister Penny, leaving her handbag on his bed. Later, he thought of her standing on the station platform in the twilight, delving for her matches, dying for a smoke. Visits upset Ida. She didn’t come every week. But the act of taking them was like reclaiming something. He was turning back into his old, sneaky self. He felt suddenly at ease, in charge again. Sneakiness was a form of privacy, and privacy here was the first loss. A resistance to the babyishness of this place, its pygmy toilets, its naps and rules, half-hospital, half-nursery school, and his feeling of demotion when he was sent here. ‘We are so very glad to have you,’ Sister Penny had said firmly when the ambulance delivered him. ‘The younger children do look up to the older ones as examples.’ Frank searched her radiant face and knew there was nothing there for him to test. Everything had been resolved a long time ago. He felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here. All of them, like him, stranded, wanting to go home. 14
Now he was gliding down the ramp of the Covered Way, past the New Treatment Block, out to the clothes lines, hidden behind a wire trellis, the only place where he wouldn’t be seen. The washing had been taken in, dried stiff by lunchtime. The ceaseless rumbling and throbbing of the Netting Factory across the road was louder out here. It was like entering the territory of a huge caged animal. Even the white glare cheered him. Ever since the fever of polio had subsided, light had seemed less bright to him, older, sadder. Moments of solitude were rare and must be grasped with both hands. He put the cigarette into his mouth and struck and struck the row of flimsy matches, one after another. Sweat trickled into his eyes, his hands shook, he wanted, unreasonably, to curse Ida. A man’s shadow blocked out the glare. A huge pair of red hands was cupping a lick of flame. ‘Light?’ Norm Whitehouse growled. Frank inhaled, his head spun, his heart surged with love. He knew now why everyone loved Norm, the gardener, who just as silently ambled off. As if to say: a man has a right to a smoke in peace. The next moment the cigarette was stubbed out on the post of the washing line and thrown across the fence. Frank thought he might be sick. Dizzy, blinded, he veered back down the dark corridor, heaved himself onto the bed. His body was not a normal boy’s any more. He wasn’t a little kid either, smelling of soap, asleep like those around him. Yet after a while, as his heart slowed, a smile spread across his face. He could still hear the rumble of Norm’s voice. ‘Light?’ He may as well have said: ‘Life?’ But where was Elsa?
THE GOLDEN AGE
Because he was so small and undeveloped for his age, Frank Gold, though nearly thirteen, had been admitted as a patient at the Golden Age. It was agreed, unanimously, at the IDB (Infectious Diseases Branch of the Royal Perth Hospital) that it really wasn’t suitable for him to stay amongst adult patients. Also, his parents were New Australians who both worked, and had no other family members to help with his care. He needed the nurturing atmosphere of the Golden Age, and supervision with schoolwork. Arrangements were made almost immediately, and he was delivered there by ambulance that same afternoon. Elsa Briggs was twelve and a half, but her mother had a little baby and couldn’t look after her at home. The other patients were younger, from all over the state: from Wiluna in the desert, from Broome up the coast, from Rawlinna, a siding on the Trans-Australia line. Nowhere, it seemed, was too remote for the polio virus to find you. ‘The Golden Age’ had been built as a pub at the turn of the century, in Leederville, five minutes’ walk from the railway station, two stops out from the city centre. It stood alone, bounded by four flat roads, like an island, which in its present incarnation seemed to symbolise its apartness, a natural quarantine. Three of the roads were lined with modest suburban houses, each one drawn back behind a stretch of dry lawn, a porch and front windows sealed by venetian blinds. Along the fourth road the twostorey WA Wire Netting Factory pounded and throbbed twenty-four hours a day. Some considered that this wasn’t a suitable location for a hospital. But the children found the noise soothing and loved the lights shining all night through their windows. The pub had been bought by the Health Department in 1949 and converted into The Golden Age Children’s Polio Convalescent Home, to service the years of the great epidemics. Inside, with its ramps and bars and walkways, its schoolteacher, trained nurses and full-time physiotherapist, it was a modern treatment centre, which could accommodate up to fourteen children, some from the country, some who could not be cared for at home. Outside, rearing up above the dusty, treeless crossroads, it still looked like a country pub. Brick, two storey, the wide upstairs balcony shaded the verandah beneath. It had thick walls for coolness, long alcoved windows, a sheltering iron roof like a hat pulled down low. Wheelchairs rolled easily along the wide, shadowy passageways, over the old polished jarrah boards. The very plainness and familiarity of its exterior seemed to proclaim its function, to give fair shelter and homely comfort. A watering hole. The name, inherited, could be considered tactless by some, even cruelly ironic. These children were impaired as no one could ever wish a child to be. But perhaps because of its former role, its solid and generous air, it was a cheerful place. The children were no longer sick, but in need of help to find their way back into the world.
‘He felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here. All of them, like him, stranded, wanting to go home.’
The staff and parents were well pleased with the Golden Age. Its rooms were spacious, cool and high-ceilinged. The children were surrounded by faces shining with hope and encouragement. Even Ida Gold (known as Princess Ida to the staff), though never slow to find fault, had to admit that she was grateful for the haven it provided. The children enjoyed the benevolence of the attention. Here, they were not a worry or a burden to make their mothers sigh with weariness. They felt different – exclusive, like a family – from the day kids, who lived at home and arrived by ambulance for schoolwork and therapy. All through the morning, children came and went between the schoolroom and the New Treatment Centre. As for Frank, he was a new boy again, working out how to be himself. He was desperate to be normal. Finding his feet, this time, meant learning how to walk. He resolved to behave well because he didn’t want another expulsion. Also, in bed at night, and sometimes in the day when it was quiet, he could hear the distant whistle and hooting of the trains pulling in and out of the Leederville station, which always reassured him. Above all, he didn’t want to leave Elsa. A line ran through his head, which might be the start of a poem. Your bed was empty today when I looked for you. Why? Polio had taken his legs, but given him his vocation: poet. 15
ELSA
Elsa was with Rayma Colley in the Babies Room. The thin wail had wafted across the corridor in the afternoon stillness and seeped into Elsa’s head. Finally she’d left her bed and wheeled her way to Rayma’s cot. ‘Stop that,’ she whispered to Rayma, peering through the bars of the cot. Her tone was firm. Elsa was not sentimental about babies. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t had a younger sister to look after. The first thing to do was to stop the crying. She put a finger in her own mouth, puffed her cheeks and pulled the finger out with a pop. Rayma paused, mid-wail. Her little dark face was wet, her eyes swollen. You had to make them think of something else. ‘Come on,’ Elsa said. She lowered the bars at the side of the cot, reached across and undid Rayma’s splints. By leaning onto the mattress for support, she was able to drag the little girl to her and pull her onto her lap. Hiccups juddered the tiny body. Tucking her chin over Rayma’s shoulder to hold her, Elsa rolled over to the window. She lifted one of the long white curtains and pulled it around the wheelchair so that she and Rayma were screened off from the rest of the room. All their world now was the view, shaded by the verandah, the slice of empty road and the houses along it, a scene as remote to them as the other side of the world. ‘Look,’ she instructed Rayma, pointing upwards. The afternoon whiteness had taken on a steely cast, a thin, ragged cloud flitted across their view. The sea breeze must be in. During the long days in hospital, the sky passing across the high window in the Isolation Ward had become Elsa’s backyard, her freedom, her picture show. Watched, the sky slowed itself to a silent, endless semaphore of shapes and colours, as if it were signalling a message. She was amazed at how she had neglected it in all her years free to roam, with the sun on her face, the wind past her ears. ‘Your mother looks at the sky and she thinks of you,’ she said to Rayma. She spoke firmly, looking into Rayma’s big, frightened eyes. For of course it was her mother whom Rayma cried for. It always was. In the Isolation Ward, Elsa had listened all day for her mother’s cloppity footsteps down the corridor, hurrying in her old orthopaedic shoes to find her, waving to her through the glass panel, smiling, trying not to look sad. And because the sky had become so important, the two – mother and sky – grew to be entwined in Elsa’s thoughts. When she looked at the sky she thought of her mother, and it seemed to be telling her that some feelings would never change and never die. If her mother didn’t come, the sky also told her that each person was alone and the world went on, no matter what was happening to you. When at last she’d left the Isolation Ward and her parents were allowed to sit by her bed, they looked smaller to her, aged by the terror they had suffered, old, shrunken, ill-at-ease. 16
‘Ever since the fever of polio had subsided, light had seemed less bright to him, older, sadder.’
Something had happened to her which she didn’t yet understand. As if she’d gone away and come back distant from everybody. Rayma had to learn to be alone. Without your mother, you had to think. It was like letting go of a hand, jumping off the high board, walking by yourself to school. Once you’d done it, you were never afraid of it again. All the kids could identify their mothers’ footsteps. They all longed for their mothers, except Frank Gold, who said he’d rather his father came. Sometimes even now in the Golden Age, after her mother visited, Elsa had the funny feeling that there was another mother waiting for her, blurred, gentle, beautiful as an angel, with an angel’s perfect understanding.
Extracted from The Golden Age by Joan London. Vintage Australia, August 2014.
INSIGHTS ROBERT DESSAIX
Cheating Time
ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY
‘To play is to be master of your time’: Robert Dessaix unpacks travelling as the ultimate expression of freedom.
In today’s crazily busy world the importance of making time for leisure is more vital than ever. The Pleasures of Leisure is Robert Dessaix’s meditation on loafing, nesting, grooming and playing, and how, when taken seriously, these things can help us to regain our freedom, to revel in life and to deepen our sense of who we
are as human beings. ‘Leisure, wisely chosen, makes even the shortest life deep,’ he writes. ‘At leisure, it transpires, we are at our most intensely and pleasurably human.’ While we each have our own ideas of what constitutes leisure, Dessaix proposes that when engaged in the act
of playing we are rooting ourselves deeply in culture. And non-competitive play, though outwardly frivolous, at some level involves us re-presenting an activity we feel in our heart of hearts is fundamental to who we are. Here Dessaix explores the notion of travel as a celebration of ritual, and a means for cheating time. 17
As far as I’m concerned, travelling eclipses all other forms of leisure. Tourism, where we give our time away from home to a business and pay it to manage it for us (two nights here, a week there with breakfasts, Economy flights all booked in advance, excursions and museum entrance fees included), has its place, of course. It’s often claimed that the business of tourism was invented by Thomas Cook. In fact, in England Cox and Kings were selling leisure travel as a package eighty years before Thomas Cook began organising outings, while a couple of millennia earlier leisure vacations were big business around the Mediterranean, but probably not packaged. Salve, mi amice! You want a Nile cruise? Not a problem. Lunch at a top-flight establishment? Try this one. The Greek islands? Follow me. But there’s no evidence that anyone in the Roman Empire was making money out of organising the whole kit and caboodle. Ideally, while I can see the uses of tourism, I like to travel in a more unconstrained fashion, without buying back time I’ve freely surrendered to others. If learning foreign languages, along with amorous dalliance, are particularly refined and enriching ways to play, deepening our humanity in a way tennis doesn’t, virtuoso travelling takes us to an even deeper, more luxuriantly bountiful level (or can do), allowing us to frolic with our Spanish or Cantonese while exploring foreign parts. Travel 18
can also embrace a fundamental human form of play many of us in these disenchanted times find it hard to enact except as theatre: ritual. And how nicely a trip, a jaunt, a weekend away or a journey far from home can frame a dalliance or three. That, at least, is how I feel about it. Millions would disagree, including my partner, Peter. He sees little point in leaving home at all to taste leisure at its finest, and he’s in good company. Horace, for example, wrote, ‘They change their sky, not their mind, who rush across the sea.’ (Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.) That’s a curmudgeonly view, I think. If it’s change you’re after, don’t rush anywhere. When I close my green front door to head down the steps to the taxi, airportbound, I make a point of not rushing, and try to stay moderately serene, or at least unruffled, in an animated sort of way, for the duration of my travels. To leave home well, I might add, you must first appreciate what you’re leaving, and come home again at the end of your peregrinations bearing gifts of some sort – if there’s one thing Enid Blyton taught me, it’s that you absolutely must be home again in time for tea (as it were). And just as leisure is richer if your working life is satisfying, so travel is more restorative if your idea of home is many-layered, if home, for all its limitations, is good. Be that as it may, it’s always worth asking ourselves why we do it, even if
travelling is one of our favourite ways of spending time. What is it about leaving home we enjoy so much? And how do we choose where to go when we do? (The answer to this last question can be especially revealing.) At the outset a word of warning: we should never travel to improve our minds. Any sort of excursion has the potential to improve the mind, but don’t leave home for that reason. To improve your mind, read a book or take a course in something or other. Travel is reinvigorating, as all good leisure is: it pleasurably restores in us something fundamental to who we have been. (A Jungian might call it our anima. I’m not a Jungian – or only when it suits me, as it does here. No better words come to mind.) As you travel, you recrystallise in a new shape with a fresh transparency. Even when you’re no longer young – no longer even middle-aged in my case – and a virtuoso performance as a traveller may demand of one more stamina than can be easily mustered (virtuosity being the true antidote to the banal, after all, not excitement); even then, if you undertake it in the right spirit, travel can be revivifying – indeed, at a certain age is there not more to restore? When you’re young it’s more a matter of updating yourself, surely, than renewal. But what is it about travel that’s restorative? I’m not talking about mere movement – I don’t mean popping over to Adelaide to see your mother, or spending a week at
‘At home, at some level I serve, I am under orders. In the end time will win, I know that, but meanwhile, when I’m far from home, and the hours are not measured out one after the other in a strand, but lie pooled here and there around me, both shallow and deep, I can cheat.’
a casino on the Gold Coast. I mean leaving behind your ordinary life to romp and play with different selves by different rules in places where your workaday life will be difficult to bring to mind. At home one is more or less oneself – well, it’s only practical. But when you travel you can enact a multitude of selves. Here I’m a prince, there I’m an adventurer, in Paris I am stylish, in London I’m invisible, I’m a pilgrim on the Ganges, I’m a pagan in Rome, I am utterly alone, I sidle up to death, I am intensely, even passionately alive, I am a time-traveller everywhere, swooping about amongst the centuries, I am well again. (In some countries I’m even tall!) At home, although I am many things, I am none of these things, nor ever will be, it’s too late. When I travel, I am – in a word – free (in a Western sort of way). It’s like being twenty again, except that I know more. There are cultures in which people seek to escape from the self by merging with a greater entity – a communitas, as one sociologist calls it, avoiding the now moth-eaten English word ‘community’. I am a Westerner, though – and happy to be one, by the way – so tend to look for escape from the self in multiplying the selves I perform or inhabit. Without unflinching vigilance I find ‘community’ edges too close for comfort to ‘mob mind’. I am also cheating time – of which I am not master at home, or not completely. At home, at some level I
serve, I am under orders. In the end time will win, I know that, but meanwhile, when I’m far from home, and the hours are not measured out one after the other in a strand, but lie pooled here and there around me, both shallow and deep, I can cheat. When I’m away on my travels my time is not so easily commandeered by others, not so split up into separate compartments by everyday demands – that’s the essence of it. In his essay on the brevity of life (and how no life is really brief or long, just well or badly spent), Seneca says that it’s his aim to prise his time from the grasp of others, to take it back and make it his own, spending it doing pleasurable things of his own choosing – to turn work into civilised leisure, in other words, or into otium as he called it in Latin, a word with little meaning for most of us these days unless we subscribe to the sea kayakers’ newsletter so named. Seneca didn’t have to shop or iron his own togas: he had slaves. He could choose otium at home. One of the most effective ways for me to prise my time from the grasp of chores and the demands of others, however, is to leave home – to travel. Above all, when I close my green front door and head down the steps to the taxi by the kerb, I’m performing a ritual. It took me years to realise that that’s what I’m doing, but I can see it now. Historically, going right back to paleolithic times, if the cave paintings are to be believed, humans have had a
huge variety of rituals to choose from: ecstatic communal dancing, bacchic revels, gladiatorial contests, feasting, the Hindus’ Durga Puja festival (amongst countless others), the Christian Eucharist, the Haj and what [author and political activist] Barbara Ehrenreich calls ‘a variety of forms of cruelty to animals’, with regular bearbaiting, cockfighting and the ritual slaughter of sheep enjoying a lasting popularity. Authoritarian institutions such as the medieval Church, and political parties on the extreme left and right in modern times have fought to keep public celebrations under their own control (Easter celebrations once upon a time, and military anniversaries in Russia and North Korea), but as any belief in transcendent realities, even a future workers’ paradise, has faded across the globe, so has ritual celebration. You celebrate a ritual in order to re-enact a higher order and at the same time influence it to re-kaleidoscope itself to your benefit: the rain-dance, not to mention Holy Communion or burning the dead beside the Ganges, are good examples of the essential ritual. To call sacred ceremonies of re-enactment in remembrance of a deity ‘play’ is not to denigrate the ceremonies, by the way, but to elevate the concept of play. They are the quintessence of humanity’s striving towards transcendence.
The Pleasures of Leisure by Robert Dessaix. Knopf Australia, May 2017. 19
COLLECTION HOGARTH SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare Revisited For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s works have been performed, read, recited, taught and loved around the world, and reinterpreted for each new generation, as films, plays, musicals or literary transformations. In October 2015, the Hogarth Press launched their Shakespeare project, to coincide with the 400th anniversary of 20
his death. The project sees The Bard’s works reimagined and brought to life for a contemporary readership. Since its inception by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917, the mission of the Hogarth Press has been to publish the best new writing of the age. Almost a century later, Jeanette Winterson’s unique take on
The Winter’s Tale became the first release under the Hogarth Shakespeare banner. Several books published in more than 20 countries have followed, and several more exciting match-ups are slated for coming years. Here’s an introduction to the first five books in this groundbreaking series.
ILLUSTRATION: ZOË CARACATSANOUDIS
The Hogarth Shakespeare project is where the world’s favourite playwright meets today’s best-loved novelists – transcending the centuries to redefine timeless storytelling.
NEW BOY BY TRACY CHEVALIER
The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a suburban Washington schoolyard. Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei Kokote knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day, so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players – teachers and pupils alike – will never be the same again. One of the world’s most successful historical novelists, Tracy Chevalier draws inspiration from her own childhood experiences at a Washington DC primary school. Against a simmering backdrop of Civil Rights-era USA, she captures deliciously nostalgic memories of clothes, skipping rhymes, pencil cases and candy from the period. ‘Othello is about what it means to be the outsider, and that feeling can start at an early age,’ she says. ‘We have all at one time or another stood on the edge of a playground, with the bullies circling, wondering if we are going to be accepted.’ HAG-SEED BY MARGARET ATWOOD
Shakespeare’s play of magic and illusion, The Tempest, reimagined by one of the world’s great literary innovators. After an act of unforeseen treachery, theatre director Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge. After twelve years, payback finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. Famously inspired by fairy tales, myths, the environment and visions of the future, The Tempest is perfectly
aligned with critically acclaimed novelist, poet, critic, activist and inventor Margaret Atwood. Her fantastical take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, revenge and second chances leads readers on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own. ‘The Tempest is, in some ways, an early multimedia musical,’ she says. ‘If Shakespeare were working today he’d be using every special effect technology now makes available. But The Tempest is especially intriguing because of the many questions it leaves unanswered. What a strenuous pleasure it has been to wrestle with it!’ VINEGAR GIRL BY ANNE TYLER
No one does family like A Spool of Blue Thread author Anne Tyler, and her retelling of The Taming of the Shrew might just feature her most appealing family yet. Kate Battista is stuck running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and infuriating younger sister, Bunny. When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable his brilliant assistant Pyotr to avoid deportation, he’s relying – as usual – on Kate to help him. Will she be able to resist the two men’s touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her over? Vinegar Girl is a surprising, funny, warm, clever and entirely believable take on one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays. Surely there’s no way a thoroughly modern, independent woman like Kate would allow herself to be married off? Tyler’s exploration of this question demonstrates just how relevant Shakespeare continues to be. THE GAP OF TIME BY JEANETTE WINTERSON
This cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of the original but tells a contemporary story where Time itself is a player in a game of high stakes. A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged
American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn’t know a lot about who she is or where she’s come from – but she’s about to find out. An adopted child herself, Jeanette Winterson has deeply explored elements of her upbringing in her writing – including acclaimed 1985 novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and bestselling 2011 memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. ‘All of us have talismanic texts that we have carried around and that carry us around,’ Winterson says of Shakespeare’s story of loss, redemption and an abandoned child. ‘I have worked with The Winter’s Tale in many disguises for many years.’ SHYLOCK IS MY NAME BY HOWARD JACOBSON
A re-envisaging of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, from Man Booker Prize-winner and great chronicler of Jewish life, Howard Jacobson. ‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship... Culminating in a shocking twist on Shylock’s demand for the infamous pound of flesh, this retelling of The Merchant of Venice examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity. Jacobson himself has described the play as ‘the most troubling of Shakespeare’s plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging.’ Of Jacobson’s interpretation, literary historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stephen Greenblatt said: ‘For him to write about and inside of The Merchant of Venice seems to me a marriage made in heaven’. 21
EXTRACT
New Boy BY TRACY CHEVALIER
A teacher must have told the new boy where to go, for he was now standing at the end of the line that had formed in front of Mr. Brabant. Blanca came to a dramatic halt, rocking back on her heels. “Now what do we do?” she cried. Dee hesitated, then stepped up to stand behind him. Blanca joined her and whispered loudly, “Can you believe it? He’s in our class! I dare you to touch him.” “Shut up!” Dee hissed, hoping he hadn’t heard. She studied his back. The new boy had the most beautifully shaped head, smooth and even and perfectly formed, like a clay pot turned on a potter’s wheel. Dee wanted to reach out and cup it in her hand. His hair was cut short, like a forest of trees dotted in tight clumps over the curves of a mountain—very different from the thick afros popular at the moment. Not that there were any afros around to look at. There were no black students at Dee’s school, or black residents in her suburban neighborhood, though by 1974 Washington, DC itself had a large enough black population to be nicknamed Chocolate City. Sometimes when she went downtown with her family she saw black men and women with big afros; and on TV when she watched Soul Train at Mimi’s house, dancing to Earth, Wind and Fire or the Jackson Five. She didn’t ever see the show at home: her mother would never let her watch black people singing and dancing on TV. Dee had a crush on Jermaine Jackson, though it was his sly toothy smile she liked rather than his afro. All of her friends preferred little Michael, who seemed to Dee too obvious a choice. It would be like choosing the cutest boy in school to have a crush on, which was perhaps why she never thought of Casper that way—and why Blanca did. Blanca always went for the obvious. “Dee, you will look after our new student today.” Mr. Brabant gestured at her from the head of the line. “Show him where the cafeteria is, the music room, the bathroom. Explain things when he doesn’t understand what is going on in class. Alright?” Blanca gasped and nudged Dee, who turned red and nodded. Why had Mr. Brabant chosen her? Was he punishing her for something? Dee never needed punishing. Her mother made sure of that. Around her, classmates were giggling and whispering. 22
“Where’d he come from?” “The jungle!” “Hoo-hoo-hoo… Ow, that hurt!” “Don’t be so immature.” “Poor Dee, having to look after him!” “Why’d Mr. B choose her? Usually a boy looks after a boy.” “Maybe none of the boys would be willing to. I wouldn’t.” “I wouldn’t either!” “Yeah, but Dee’s Mr. B’s pet—he knows she won’t say no.” “Smart.” “Wait a minute—does this mean that that boy is going to sit at our desks?” “Ha ha! Poor Duncan, stuck with the new boy! Patty too.” “I’ll move!” “Mr. B won’t let you.” “I will.” “Dream on, buddy boy.” The new boy glanced behind him. His face was not wary and guarded as Dee would have expected, but open and welcoming. His eyes were black, glistening coins that regarded her with curiosity. He raised his eyebrows, widening his eyes further, and Dee felt a jolt course through her, similar to what she experienced once when she touched an electric fence for a dare. She did not speak to him, but nodded. He returned the nod, then turned back so that he was facing forward again. They stood in line, quiet, embarrassed. Dee looked around to see if anyone was still watching them. Everyone was watching them. She settled her eyes on a house across the street from the school—Casper’s house, in fact—hoping they would all assume she had her mind on important things out in the wider world rather than on the boy in front of her, who seemed to vibrate with electricity. Then she noticed the black woman standing on the other side of the chain-link fence surrounding the playground, a hand entwined in the wire mesh. Though short, she was made taller by a red and yellow patterned scarf wrapped like a towering turban around her head. She had on a long dress made of the same bright fabric. Over it she wore
a gray winter coat—even though it was early May and warm. She was watching them. “My mother thinks that I do not know how to be the new boy.” Dee turned, amazed that he had spoken. In his place she wouldn’t have said a word. “Have you been a new boy before?” “Yes. Three times in six years. This will be my fourth school.” Dee had always lived in the same house, gone to the same school and had the same friends, and was accustomed to a comfortable familiarity underpinning everything she did. She couldn’t imagine being a new girl and not knowing everyone else—though in a few months when she moved from elementary school to junior high, she would know only a quarter of the students in her grade. While in many ways Dee had outgrown her school and was ready to move on to a new one, the thought of being surrounded by strangers sometimes made her stomach ache. Across from them in the line for the other sixth grade class, Mimi was watching this exchange, wide-eyed. Dee and Mimi had almost always been in the same class together, and it pained Dee that, this last year of elementary school, they had been assigned different teachers, so she couldn’t be with her best friend all day but had to settle for playground time. It also meant Blanca, who was in Dee’s class, could try to get closer—as she was now, literally hanging on Dee, a hand on her shoulder, staring at the new boy. Blanca was always physical, throwing her arms around people, playing with friends’ hair, rubbing up against boys she liked. Dee shook her off now to focus on the boy. “Are you from Nigeria?” she asked, eager to show off her prior knowledge of him. You may be a different color, she thought, but I know you. The boy shook his head. “I am from Ghana.” “Oh.” Dee had no idea where Ghana was except that it must be in Africa. He still seemed friendly, but the expression had frozen onto his face and was becoming less sincere. Dee was determined to demonstrate that she did know something about African culture. She nodded at the woman by the fence. “Is your mom wearing a dashiki?” She knew the word because for Christmas her hippie aunt had given her pants with a dashiki pattern on them. To please her, Dee had worn them at Christmas dinner, and had to endure frowns from her mother and teasing from her older brother about wearing a tablecloth when they already had one on the table. Afterwards she had shoved the pants to the back of her closet and not touched them since. “Dashikis are shirts that African men wear,” the boy said. He could have been scornful or made fun of her, but instead he was matter‑of‑fact. “Or black Americans sometimes when they want to make a point.” Dee nodded, though she wondered what that point was. “I think the Jackson Five wore them on Soul Train.” The boy smiled. “I was thinking of Malcolm X—he wore a dashiki once.” Now it seemed he was teasing her a
little. Dee found she didn’t mind if it meant the stiff, frozen look disappeared. “My mother is wearing a dress made from kente cloth,” he continued. “It is fabric from my country.” “Why is she wearing a winter coat?” “Unless we are in Ghana, she feels the cold even when it is warm outside.” “Are you cold too?” “No, I am not cold.” The boy answered in full, formal sentences, the way Dee and her classmates did during French lessons once a week. His accent wasn’t American, though it contained some American phrases. There was a hint of English in it. Dee’s mother liked to watch Upstairs, Downstairs on TV; he sounded a bit like that, though not as clipped and expensive, and with more of a singsong cadence that must come from Africa. His full sentences and lack of contractions, the lilt in his speech, the rich exaggeration of his vowels, all made Dee want to smile, but she didn’t want to be impolite. “Is she going to pick you up after school too?” she asked. Her own mother never came to school except for parent–teacher meetings. She didn’t like to leave the house. The boy smiled again. “I have made her promise not to come. I know the way home.” Dee smiled back. “Probably better. Only the kids on the younger playground have their parents bring them to school and pick them up.” The second bell rang. The fourth grade teachers turned and led their lines of children through the entrance from the playground into school. Then fifth graders would go, and finally the sixth grade classes. “Would you like me to carry the ropes for you?” the boy asked. “Oh! No, thanks—they’re not heavy.” They were kind of heavy. No boy had ever offered to carry them for her. “Please.” The boy held out his arms and she handed them to him. “What’s your name?” she asked as their line began to move. “Osei.” “O…” The name was so foreign that Dee could not find a hook in it to hang on to. It was like trying to climb a smooth boulder. He smiled at her confusion, clearly used to it. “It is easier to call me O,” he said, bringing his name into the familiar arena of letters. “I don’t mind. Even my sister calls me O sometimes.” “No, I can say it. O‑say‑ee. Is it in your language?” “Yes. It means ‘noble.’ What is your name, please?” “Dee. Short for Daniela, but everybody calls me Dee.” “Dee? Like the letter D?” She nodded. They looked at each other, and this simple link of letters standing in for their names made them burst out laughing. O had beautiful straight teeth, a flash of light in his dark face that sparked something inside her. Extracted from New Boy by Tracy Chevalier. Hogarth Press, May 2017. 23
24
ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS RIDDELL
SATIRE HOWARD JACOBSON
Dirty Words IN PUSSY, HOWARD JACOBSON UNLEASHES THE WEAPON OF SATIRE TO HELP US ALL MAKE SENSE OF PLANET EARTH, 2017.
Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its goldengated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasising about prostitutes. He is idle, boastful, thinskinned and egotistic; has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no ideas and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again? Here is a glimpse of this provocatively entertaining and savage satire of Donald Trump by one of Britain’s greatest comic novelists.
But then the time came, as it must in the life of every child, gifted or not, to be removed from the condition of baby celebrity – where every burp and bubble is taken as an earnest sign of future greatness – to the obscure literalism of the schoolroom, where marks are awarded for performance and promise counts for nothing. Punching, biting, scratching and swearing, Fracassus descended from the roof terrace with its infinity pool, its sandpit, its swings and roundabouts, its giant television, its bar serving baby cocktails, hamburgers and candyfloss, and the constant attendance of reporters and photographers from Brightstar, to the classrooms of the lower Palace, to questions, comprehension tests, and words. For Fracassus this was a tailspin into darkest hell. Words! Until now he had whimpered, exclaimed, ejaculated, and whatever he had wanted had come to him on a golden platter amid praise and plaudits. So why, he wondered – or would have wondered had he possessed the words to wonder with – the necessity for change? The enormity of the shock, for any child, of having to go from pointing to naming cannot be exaggerated. But for Fracassus, for whom to wish was to be given, it
was as catastrophic as birth. To have to find a word to supply a need is to admit the difference between the world and you. Fracassus knew of no such difference. The world had been his, to eat, to tear, to kick. He hadn’t had to name it. The world was him. Fracassus. He had had no friends. He was the Prince. Princes proper have no friends. Jago had been too preoccupied in his search for self to be a brother to him. And in a sense he didn’t have parents either. The Grand Duchess, when she wasn’t travelling on business with the Grand Duke, was locked in her reading room, turning pages and letting her mind drift. Reading was an auditory experience for her. The leaves of her favourite novels fluttered between her fingers and as they did she could hear the wind blow through the enchanted forest. Sometimes she would turn only to turn back again, letting the pages sigh to her of danger then of rescue, rescue then of danger, back and forth. The books she loved best were printed on the finest paper, as diaphanous as fairy wings. They might float from her they were so slight. But when she snapped a volume shut she could hear the castle gates crash closed. Hush! She was
alone. Wild beasts prowled. Who would come to her assistance now? Help, help! For all his ambitions for his son, the Grand Duke was barely any better acquainted with him. He was too absorbed in his idea of Fracassus to notice him in actuality. It’s also possible he was frightened of him. The boy’s uncanny, he sometimes thought. He lacks charm, he lacks looks, he lacks humour, he lacks quickness, he lacks companionableness, and yet he’s arrogant! He didn’t doubt that these absences would one day be the presences that got Fracassus noticed, but until then the Grand Duke had to find a way to live with him as a father. This he did by travelling overseas as often as he could. There was talk on every floor of the Palace about the meaning of this parental dereliction. Some of the servants tried to be sorry for the boy but their pity foundered on some quality in him that repelled affection in any form. The word ‘obnoxious’ was starting to be whispered in the lifts. Nox was a far-off colony of the Republic that was seldom visited. Its inhabitants were reported to be querulous and slow-witted and to have small hands. People disliked for 25
those or a host of other reasons were thought of as obnoxious – coming from Nox. Could that have been the real reason the Grand Duke and Duchess kept their distance – that they too thought of him as a visitant from Nox? Hitherto, with no one listening or keeping an eye open, with no one prepared to doubt that his brain brewed extraordinary mental projects and that he spoke of them in arcane tongues to people unequipped to understand, the absence in him of the wherewithal to construct a sentence or progress a thought had gone unnoticed. Until now. The tutors into whose hands he’d suddenly fallen, like a god toppling from high estate into a fiery lake of devils, grasped the enormity of their task at once. Fracassus was not only short of words, he seemed to be in a sort of war with them. Had he only been surly they would have employed methods designed to relax him, make him feel safe, and communication would soon have followed. But he already was, in his surly way, communicative. He would answer their questions. He would sometimes even essay something in the nature of rough play, though he would immediately shrink should anyone play rough games back. The problem was that he seemed to feel he could get by well enough with the words he had and any attempt to teach him more was an attack upon him personally. Furthermore, he failed to see, since his tutors had words and they could do nothing better with their lives than teach him, just exactly what words had to recommend them. Did he want to end up like them? He believed himself to be complete. Ineducable because there was nothing more he would need to know – and certainly nothing more these failures could ever teach him – for the life he intended to live. ‘You’re all prostitutes,’ he told them once. And on another occasion, he called them ‘whores’. 26
They didn’t know whether to commend him for his loquacity – prostitute was the longest word they’d heard him use, and whore the most surprising – or discommend him for his misogyny. As time went on and Fracassus’s education didn’t, his tutors acknowledged they were in a ticklish situation. They were paid handsomely to bring the boy up to scratch; alerting the Grand Duke and Duchess to the fact that scratch was still a long way beyond him would have been self-destructive. Whose fault, in that case, was that? Who but they could be to blame? The argument they prepared in their own defence, without accepting that there was anything to defend, went as follows: Fracassus is an independent child with an original mind. His thoughts, we are pleased to report, are unhampered by that dependence on received opinion which we often see to be the price paid by those who are overly articulate, language-crammed or well read. Since words come to us infected by assumptions of which even the most self-conscious can remain unaware, the more disengaged from language a man is, the more connected to his own heart we can rely on him to be. The chief architect of this argument had been Dr Cobalt, the only woman on the team of Fracassus’s tutors. A graduate of three universities and holding degrees in two soft subjects and one middlingly hard, Dr Cobalt was tall and slender like a snowy egret and made flustered men think longingly of the cool and even icy climates of the past. She had been the Grand Duke’s choice. Being masculinist by inclination – a hunter before he was strong enough to shoulder a rifle, a boxer before a glove tiny enough for his little fist could be found – Fracassus, his father believed, would surely benefit from contact with her gentler virtues. They all would. The Grand Duke, as evidenced by his taste in domestic architecture, was epithetical by
nature. And everything about Yoni Cobalt suggested adjectives. She had long hair, big eyes, full breasts, and wore high heels. And every adjective cried out for an adverb. She had very long hair, very big eyes, very full breasts, and wore very high heels. That she could have been a very successful catwalk model or children’s television presenter made her decision to sacrifice herself to the bringing up of Fracassus the more estimable. Her senior on the tutorial staff, Dr Strowheim, commended her in moderation to the Grand Duke and Duchess, but repeated as though it were his own argument that their son was enriched by what he didn’t know. Whether Dr Cobalt was right to have mentioned to him and other members of the teaching staff that the Prince seemed more interested in looking up her skirt than in learning the difference between an active and a passive verb, was another matter. ‘It would depend,’ Dr Strowheim had jested, but with a distinct note of caution, ‘on how actively he looked.’ ‘Pretty actively,’ Dr Cobalt said. ‘But it was only a look?’ ‘As opposed to what?’ ‘As opposed to a more physical exploration.’ ‘It was only a look, though the last time he looked I did fear that it presaged—’ ‘Then let’s say it was passive,’ the Doctor put in finally. It did occur to him to suggest she wear trousers in the future, but trousers on women were implicitly banned in the Palace – the Grand Duchess was known not to own a pair – and, if he were to be honest about it, he would have missed the skirt himself.
Extracted from Pussy by Howard Jacobson. Jonathan Cape, April 2017.
CLASSIC LITTLE WOMEN
‘Once she began writing, the story poured out of her. Sometimes she was so engrossed she forgot to eat or sleep.’ Kate Forsyth
Now and Then READING INTO THE PAST
ILLUSTRATION: CEOL RYDER
Kate Forsyth captures the magic of classic fairy tales in her books for children and adults. Her latest novel, Beauty in Thorns – a reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, set among the Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets, to be published in July – continues in this tradition. When asked to share a favourite classic book, she’s returned to where her love of literature began: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
‘I like good, strong words that mean something,’ Jo March says in the opening chapters of Little Women, and with that single sentence she taught me how to write. When I was a kid growing up and wanting desperately to be an author, there were not many books about girls who wanted to write books. I can think of only two: Emily of New Moon by Lucy Maud Montgomery and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I bought the latter for twenty cents at a school fete because it had a picture of a dark-haired girl holding a book on the front cover. It has been one of my favourite novels ever since. Jo could have been me. A tomboy with messy brown hair, ink-stained fingers, always climbing trees with a book tucked under her arm, loving to play pretend, and scribble down
stories, and dream of being a great author. What I love most about Little Women is how real it all seems. The four girls are so alive. From the very first line, they speak in their own distinct voices, and their problems and arguments and anxieties ring true. This may have been because the book was inspired by Louisa’s own life. Like Jo, she was the second of four daughters, born into a poor family with an unconventional father who was a passionate abolitionist, early socialist and supporter of women’s rights. The family even lived on a commune for a while. All the girls needed to work to support the family, and Louisa – like Jo – turned her hand to writing ‘sensation’ stories to help pay the bills.
In 1868, a publisher asked Louisa if she’d write a book for girls. She was reluctant, thinking such books ‘moral pap for the young’. However, when the publisher sweetened the deal by offering her father a publishing deal too, Louisa agreed. Once she began writing, the story poured out of her. Sometimes she was so engrossed she forgot to eat or sleep. It took her only ten weeks to write, and was published in September 1868 to instant success. I am not the only girl who saw herself in spirited Jo, or who felt like her: ‘I want to do... something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead... I mean to astonish you all someday.’ Little Women by Louisa May Alcott was first published in 1868. 27
RECIPE INSECTS: AN EDIBLE FIELD GUIDE
FIG 2:
Red Onion
FIG 3:
Aubergine
Witchetty Grub Kebabs You might think of this as some kind of cruel culinary joke, but witchetty grubs are true nutritional marvels. Are you game enough to try Stefan Gates’ Witchetty Grub Kebabs?
FIG 4:
Lemon
This is the Boo Radley of the entomophagy world. Its name (sometimes spelt ‘witjuti’) refers to the Acacia kempeana bush on whose roots it feeds. Scary and vast as they are (growing up to ten centimetres long) witchetty grubs make excellent eating and are renowned for their ambrosial taste. They are an important bush-tucker food for Aboriginal Australians for good reason: they are packed with protein. They also belong to the small group of insects that are often eaten raw, whereas most insects are cooked (for reasons of both food hygiene and gastronomy). Despite popular TV programmes showing the eating of live insects as a challenge, this rarely happens in major entomophagic cultures, where they know that the application of heat makes for marvellous transformations to protein-rich foods as well as dealing with potential pathogens. Witchetty grubs are much tastier when baked, but munch them raw if that’s what floats your boat. They are a hard-won food – not every bush will be infested with them, and they must be dug out using much effort in an environment that is often very hot and dry. INGREDIENTS 1 red onion (cut into eighths) 1 aubergine (cut into chunks) 1 lemon
METHOD
• Skewer your grubs with the red onion and the aubergine and squeeze lemon juice over. • Cook over a hot barbecue or under a hot grill until the bugs are crisp on the outside, like sausages. • Squeeze on more lemon and season. Extracted from Insects: An Edible Field Guide by Stefan Gates.
FIG 1:
Witchetty Grub
28
Ebury Press, June 2017.
ILLUSTRATION: CANDELA RIVEROS & SHUTTERSTOCK
10 witchetty grubs
COLLECTION WINTER READING
End Notes Reach into the lengthening shadows and you might discover the joys of reading on the sinister side. From labyrinthine espionage to apocalyptic visions, historical horrors to domestic noir, this is where diversity rules and presumptions should be left at the door. Here are five winter reads that offer varying degrees of darkness, so you can test the limits of your comfort zone.
INTO THE WATER BY PAULA HAWKINS
In the last days before her death, Nel called her sister – but Jules didn’t pick up the phone. They say Nel jumped, and now Jules has been dragged back to the one place she hoped she had escaped for good, to care for the teenage girl her sister left behind. Jules is afraid: of her long-buried memories, of the old Mill House, of knowing that Nel would never have jumped. But most of all she’s afraid of the water, and the place they call the Drowning Pool…
ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY
CHARLATAN BY CATHERINE JINKS
1860s stage mesmerist Thomas Guthrie Carr is charged with raping a woman under his influence. But if mesmerism is a sham, how could this charge possibly be upheld? Charlatan is the story of the court case that follows. One part social history, another part mystery, it’s also a delicately humorous exami-
nation of a crime, and a portrait of a man whose ferocious pursuit of publicity made him an oddly contemporary figure. THE 7TH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE BY LAURENT BINET
Towering literary figure Roland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van, and dies soon afterwards. He has just come from lunch with François Mitterrand, who is locked in a battle for the Presidency. History tells us it was an accident. But what if Barthes was carrying a document of monumental importance? In this world of intellectuals and politicians, Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog stare in the face of a global conspiracy, and everyone’s a suspect. YEAR OF THE ORPHAN BY DANIEL FINDLAY
Outback Australia, hundreds of years from now: a girl races across the desert
pursued by the reckoner, scavenged spoils held close. Among the crumbling bones of civilisation, she survives by picking over the dead past. The Orphan carries secrets about the destruction that brought the world to its knees. And she’s about to discover that the past still holds power over the present. But she must decide if what’s left of humanity is worth saving. SPOILS BY BRIAN VAN REET
Nineteen-year-old Specialist Cassandra Wigheard is deployed to Iraq and primed for war. But when she is taken prisoner by jihadist Abu al-Hool and his mujahideen brotherhood, both fighters find their loyalties tested to the limits. In this harrowing account of eight weeks in the lives of soldier and captor, lines between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are erased under the cloud of uncertainty, fear and idealism that characterised the early days of the Iraq War. 29
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