With The Woman Upstairs, her fifth book, Messud narrows her range, concentrating on a devastated woman recounting a critical event in her life. Nora is an elementary school teacher living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who experiences a ‘Lucy Jordan moment’ when she realises at the age of 37 that her life, like that of the ballad’s heroine, looks small and any hope for change is not for her. She lives alone, and has recently lost her mother to a particularly cruel form of motor neurone disease. She once had ‘a love, and a love affair with a worldly life, and I left it’; she also once had ambitions to be an artist. But only vestiges of that self remain, in the miniature dioramas that she makes for a series entitled ‘A Room of One’s Own?’. She feels she has done well as a dutiful daughter, and not too badly on the career front, but she fears she has not left enough time to answer the ‘two big exam questions’ that really matter, ‘the question of art, and the question of love’.

Both questions will be posed by the Shahid family, newly arrived from Paris. Reza, the beautiful eight year old boy who comes into her class, ‘a child from a fairy tale’, is the son of Sirena, an Italian installation artist, and Skandar, a French-educated Lebanese historian of ideas. Nora feels that in their presence the world opens up to her – there is hope, and a feeling of possibility. Reza calls forth her protective maternal love, Sirena is a siren call to her ambitious desires, and Skandar, whose name is an Arabic version of Alexander, enchants her with his talk of the wider world of politics and history where he seems like a modern Alexander the Great – and both adults inspire sexual desires that are intensified by Nora’s loneliness. She agrees to share a studio with Sirena, whom she helps with an ambitious installation based on Alice in Wonderland, and works with new delight on her own art. She becomes obsessed with Sirena, whose friendly embrace can send her into an ecstasy and whose failure to telephone can pitch her into despair. In this strange realm of obsession, Nora wants to be Sirena as much as she wants to possess her. Sirena is, after all, the ‘ideal woman artist’ that Nora has so far failed to be.

It’s bound to end badly, of course, as Nora’s narrative hints from the very beginning. As readers, we are given good reason to anticipate this from the indirect observations allowed us. In a rare reality check, Nora’s sensible friend Didi says: ‘So you’re in love with Sirena and you want to fuck her husband and steal her child. Have I got it right?’ Nora hotly denies this, yet there is a caricatured kind of truth about it. Even so, the betrayal she eventually suffers at Sirena’s hands is extreme. In retrospect, Nora realises that all three Shahids are like the black monk in Chekhov’s story of that name. Each of them has reawakened her to a belief in herself and the possibilities of life: ‘Each one, in my impassioned interior conversation, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden, heart’s desires: life, art, motherhood, love and the great seductive promise that I wasn’t nothing.’ But the black monk is a figment of the imagination of Chekhov’s lonely and embittered protagonist. Are we to understand the Shahids similarly?

Messud takes on the difficult task of creating Nora as an unreliable – and also often unlikeable – narrator. Unlike the narrator of her earlier novella, The Hunters (2001), who is quite clearly delusional, Nora is only desperately needy and possessed of – and by – a perfervid imagination. She is pathetic but also brave. She is provincial and limited, but also open to new experiences, and vulnerably so. As narrator, she deflects our pity at the same time as she demands our belief in her, and she is defensive, introducing herself with an angry tirade: ‘How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.’ Messud has spoken of her fascination with ‘ranting’ narrators in fiction, and how rare it is for such unlikeable figures to be female, remarking that ‘nothing is more unseemly in society than an angry woman’. Nora is her experiment in creating a female protagonist who is driven by an anger so fierce that she could kill – or else immolate herself in its fire. Yet the self-consciously angry passages that frame the novel are not entirely convincing, given the ‘woman upstairs’ persona that Nora inhabits throughout the tale that she recounts.

Nora’s narrative is scattered with literary references to her situation. There is not only the monk who haunts Chekhov’s poor scholar but other stories of sequestered souls in torment – she alludes to the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) in his basement, and to Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864), only to deny their relevance to her own ‘upstairs’ and apparently eminently sane self. Women like herself are ‘always upstairs. We’re not the madwomen in the attic – they get lots of play, one way or another … In our lives of quiet desperation the woman upstairs is who we are … and not a soul registers that we are furious. We’re completely invisible.’ The reference to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s feminist study of women’s novels, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), the title of which alludes to the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847), slides with apparent inevitability to Thoreau’s famous line about ‘lives of quiet desperation’. And of course a heroine named Nora does not have to draw attention to the parallel with Ibsen’s heroine, escaping more than a century earlier from a different doll’s house, a different kind of confinement in ordinariness.

‘I want to make my nothingness count,’ says Nora. This is, essentially, the challenge that Messud has set herself in writing Nora’s story: how to make a character who is ordinary and somewhat pathetic into a narrator whose voice demands and retains attention. This is achieved in part through the affective power of the story, and in part through descriptions of both Nora’s and Sirena’s art works and the processes of their making.

Nora practises the art of the diorama, constructing painted and furnished miniature rooms in which her chosen women artists are to be depicted: reclusive Emily Dickinson in her Amherst bedroom; the painter Alice Neel as a young woman imprisoned in an asylum ward; Virginia Woolf filling her pockets with stones and writing her suicide note; and finally Edie Sedgwick’s room in Warhol’s Factory, wallpapered with images of her waif-like beauty – Sedgwick representing the opposite of the artist: a woman who ‘existed only in the public gaze’. Nora only ever completes the first of this series, the Emily Dickinson. This suggests that she will always remain a hidden artist – not succumbing to madness, certainly, but also without the will to drive her project to completion. Her choice of art form is also significant: the ‘dollhouse labour’ required to make her own ‘Lilliputian world’ recalls her work as a teacher with young children at the same time as it echoes her habitual self-effacement. ‘Why so small?’ asks Skandar of her dioramas; ‘is it because they feel they’re not allowed to be bigger?’ But they do allow Nora, as their maker, the illusion of complete control, creating a god’s eye view of a microcosm. In the conversations with Skandar that awaken her to the wider world, Nora repeatedly has the experience of feeling ‘as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above.’  As an artist, too, she likes to see from above a whole dollhouse world of her own making.

These miniature rooms suggest the interior space and time of her subjectivity is diminished and bounded. Indeed, as Susan Stewart argues in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature: The Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1993) miniatures belong to the genre of tableau rather than narrative. They tend ‘toward silence and spatial boundaries rather than toward expository closure.’ While Nora’s narrative takes exactly that expository direction, her art work tends toward silence and stasis. In some respects, it merely repeats the miniature diorama format for which she first received praise at school, when the students were set the quite surrealist exercise of representing ‘a bee inside a violin inside a pear’ .

Nora’s works also evoke the theatrical origins of the diorama, where an illuminated painted scene, often with model figures, is viewed through an opening; where a whole tableau can be glimpsed as if from a great distance. And it is exactly this impression of being watched from outside or above by an unseen observer that assails Nora when she is working at night in the studio: ‘I’d look up from my table and realize that I was alone in a tiny pool of light in a great dark room, as if I were myself the figure in someone else’s diorama, manipulated in my own stage set by a giant I could not see’ – a chilling intimation of the novel’s resolution.

Ekphrasis, the representation of a visual object in a literary text, functions in The Woman Upstairs as a model or icon of each woman’s character. Sirena’s larger-than-life-sized Wonderland scenes, ironised by her recycling of household junk for their materials, require human actors to enter into them and make them their own – as Nora does. In contrast, Nora’s exquisite dioramas, where each tiny object is hand-made, can only be observed from a distance, and they contain their maker’s most secret desires, encrypted. Nora tells Sirena how she turned to making these ‘rooms the size of shoe boxes’ when her mother was dying and she ‘stopped being able to make any big gestures at all’. She cannot, however, bring herself to explain how she also stopped trying to show her work, but kept these pieces close to her, as if to keep them and her mother alive. ‘These are the fragments I have shored against my ruin’ she says, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot’s line from The Waste Land (1922), and her narrative, like that poem, has an undercurrent of unresolved grief and longing.

Nora remarks in passing that when the Shahids entered her life, ‘My mother was only two years dead, that fall. It felt like an immense distance then, but now, in time’s accordion folds, the two events … seem almost contiguous.’ Despite her excitement and pleasure, there is a sense in which Nora remains trapped in grief. The ‘longing’ that she identifies as her overriding feeling speaks to this interpretation: it is a desire that will never be satisfied, so that ‘it carries its quality of reaching, but not attaining, of yearning, of a physical pull that is intense and yet melancholy, always already a little sorrowful, self-knowing, in some wise passionate and in some measure resigned.’ This passivity is finally overcome when the revelation of betrayal makes her ‘angry enough, finally, God willing, with my mother’s anger also on my shoulders, a great boil of rage like the sun’s fire in me – before I die to fucking well live.’ It is as if part of Nora has died with her mother, the part that was always recognised and loved: ‘Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all,’ she reflects. At the core of the novel, then, is the exploration of her subjectivity, signalled by the epigraph taken from Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532): ‘Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.’

Even if her expressions of rage are less convincing than her expressions of need and desire and her underlying grief, the function of Nora’s anger is empowerment. It is a familiar feminist theme: when a woman is driven to anger instead of sadness, she is invigorated and emboldened; it enables her to assert herself, ‘to fucking well live’. For Nora, it also drives her to make a different kind of art: the narrative that she creates as she looks back some years later on the Shahid experience. Unlike the frozen moments and the deathly associations of her shrine-like dioramas, it is a totally new aesthetic for her. It aims at Susan Stewart’s ‘expository closure’: ‘But if I can just explain, all will be elucidated; and maybe that elucidation alone will prove my greatness, however small. To tell what I know, and how it feels, if I can. You might see yourself, if I do.’ The ‘you’ here can be the reader, who is constantly addressed directly in the framing opening and closing chapters; but it is surely also Nora’s other self, so secret as to be unreachable by her everyday self. And her ‘greatness, however small’ is precisely the point.

‘The question now is how to work it, how to use that invisibility, to make it burn,’ says Nora. If ‘fantasy determines reality,’ as she believes, then invisibility is a better fantasy than escape by flying away, because being invisible ‘makes things more real’: ‘You walk into a room where you are not, and you hear what people say, unguardedly; you watch how they move when they aren’t with you. You see them without their masks – or in their various masks, because suddenly you can see them anywhere. It may be painful to learn what happens when you’re behind the arras; but then, please God, you know.’ Nora is claiming a new kind of power, the power of the fiction writer. And her creator, Claire Messud, has demonstrated her ability to exercise that power in spades.

References

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, 1979).
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press 1993).
‘The Woman Upstairs: A saga of anger and thwarted ambition,’ NPR Books (9 May 2013).

The use of quotations from The Tempest as epigraphs for the book’s five separate, yet thematically linked sections signals a preoccupation with what one might call the rational magic of things, with connected ideas of illusion and reality, and the transformative possibilities presented by seeing and making art. The poems frequently foreground particular artefacts and scrutinise their significance. They provide views of existence that are often stilled, or at least distanced from immediate, quotidian reality. They examine how what is contained and apparently restrictive may effloresce with ideas of freedom. They posit the idea that human emotional responses might find their analogues in strangely beautiful and shifting patterns of crystals and weather. They explore ways in which we might begin to newly visualise the workings of the mind and imagination. And they ask whether the experience of aftermath may provide particular ways of knowing the self.

A number of the poems – especially the section of six prose poems entitled ‘Room and Bell’ – are reminiscent of some of Gaston Bachelard’s preoccupations in The Poetics of Space (1958). Bachelard writes of ‘how forcefully … [poets] prove to us that the houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us … as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living.’ He quotes Rainer Maria Rilke’s lines ‘Oh longing for places that were not / cherished enough in that fleeting hour’ and discusses how houses from the past ‘will appear from out of the shadow’ if ‘we have retained an element of dream in our memories, if we have gone beyond merely assembling exact recollections.’

Bachelard might almost have been referring to Hotel Hyperion in making such observations, so persistently do Gorton’s poems return to ideas of houses, the power and strange transformations of memory, and the significance of associated fragments. Bachelard even has an observation pertinent to this last aspect of Gorton’s work. He notes that houses do not necessarily come back to us whole and cites Rilke’s observation in The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) that ‘I never saw this strange dwelling again … but [it] is quite dissolved and distributed inside me.’ Like Rilke’s lines, many of Gorton’s poems provide a poetic image of the past in which the fragmented recollection of a once solid reality is conjured again as potent images of mind and language. Houses and their rooms may be lost, yet they can be recreated as impressionistic assemblages of detail and feeling – almost phantasmagorical and full of yearning and mystery.

Here is one of Gorton’s ways of addressing the subject:

Afternoon rain on the windows,
bare rooms stilled with light – an idea of the house
that had always haunted your life in it,
as if to say This is the machine of the present.
It reinvents experience as a daydream.
(‘The Humanity of Abstract Painting’)

The first sequence of poems in this book, entitled ‘Dreams and Artefacts’, immediately leads the reader into a consideration of how museum displays do not show us the original thing – or certainly not the original thing in the original context. Instead, they often offer re-creations that are simultaneously like and unlike the thing itself, and in this they begin to look something like the functioning of memory and dream:

Patiently, ticket by ticket, a soft-stepped crowd
advances into the mimic ship’s hull half-
sailed out of the foyer wall, as if advancing into
somebody else’s dream –
…
They might be mine – at least, things loosed
from a dream I had, off and on, for years.
They have suffered nothing, these things raised
from a place less like place than like memory itself –
(‘after the Titanic Artefact Exhibition’, I)

The motif of dreaming also figures strongly in the second poem in this sequence, in which a staircase from the Titanic, ‘festooned’ by growths and erosions from its immersion in the sea, ‘returns / to the conditions of dream’. In another poem, rain is ‘like a dream without emblems, an in-drawn shine’. Gorton seems to be suggesting that it is the moment when the usual workings of human time cease – when ‘history pours through’ (‘after the Titanic Artefact Exhibition’, III) – that we are allowed access to strange, potentially salutary and chastening perspectives about existence. What’s more, these perspectives are partly the products of containment in time and space, and of aftermath. They are the result of an understanding of experience that is derived from artefacts of history and knowledge, rather than quotidian doings.

These poems about the Titanic defamiliarise the known by emphasising the oddities of memory, and the way memory approximates a kind of dreaming. They also highlight the way in which history, museology and art recast, still and isolate many phenomena we would otherwise hardly notice. Even the weather is seen to be creating its own strangeness as ‘clouds build and ruin imaginary cities, / slow-mo historical epics with the sound down’.

The book’s second section is a series of meditations on a storm glass. For those unfamiliar with this apparatus, a storm glass is a mysterious predictor of the weather – a glass container sealing in a mixture of ingredients that form patterns of crystals, apparently in response to changing weather patterns. The storm glass may be best known among students of history for its use by Admiral Robert FitzRoy when he accompanied Charles Darwin on the second voyage of HMS Beagle – a voyage instrumental in the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Gorton’s interest in the storm glass is not so much historical as poetical, although her opening poem in this sequence briefly makes use of FitzRoy’s comments about storm glasses. For Gorton, the storm glass suggests the mysterious, protean, magical-seeming changeableness of what we see and usually believe we understand – there is a reference in a poem to the idea that storm glasses were invented by alchemists. It also suggests even more elusive things, such as ‘a Jamesian / treasury of scruples, or that more formal vaulting of remorse –’. Lines such as these, which link the storm glass to abstract values – and there are a number of them in this sequence – draw Gorton’s consideration of this apparatus towards a kind of metaphysics of human emotional and intellectual responsiveness.

However, these poems remain to some extent elusive because the connections between the storm glass, the treasury of scruples and the vaulting of remorse are hardly teased out. Instead, like the storm glass itself, the poems revel in the self-contained alchemy of their transformations – and, in this way, Gorton invests the storm glass with a dynamic metaphorical life. Its ‘grottoes’ are ‘epitomes / of fantastical ambition’ and its crystals are ‘in colours of obduracy’, evincing a ‘version of tact / which gives volume to silence’. The crystals also have an ‘exactness peculiar to foreboding’ and a kind of contained, self-referentiality, ‘where images fold into images the way a child disappears / into the film in which she plays herself –’

This ideas of containment, self-referentiality and self-possession can be found everywhere in this volume – most obviously in the repeated images of mirrors. It is as if the poet wants her readers to step outside of their lives and into an immersion-experience with her art. She wants them to consider such matters as how a person may give ‘his whole life to become // his idea of himself’. It is also as if the storm glass is an analogue for the way human beings may address their sense of being – or even the way that they might live, if only their self-containment were ever complete.

The fifth poem of this sequence refers to Mantegna’s famous series of paintings, Triumphs of Caesar and, in this context, making and creating becomes a process of ‘wreckage / upon wreckage’. This reminds the reader not only of the poor condition of Mantegna’s masterpieces, but of the way in which the paintings themselves document the destruction of culture and decontextualise the numerous artefacts which constitute the trophies of war. Here Gorton seems to be contemplating the cycles of destruction and transformation through which art is built on the ruins of cultures that preceded it, and also how art, so much at the core of human activity and its transformative imaginings, is ‘uninhabitable’ – that art is extraordinary in its beautiful, contained remoteness from the quotidian, even as it comments and illustrates quotidian things. It is partly for this reason that the storm glass is characterised as a ‘book of hauntings’, because it seems to suggest so much that common sense would tell us has no place within its sealed container.

Hauntings, contained spaces and rooms are tropes that carry over into the book’s fourth section, ‘The Hotel Hyperion’. In this sequence, the reader is granted a vision of a future where a collector gathers artefacts in order to construct a history of space travel. The section opens with a poem from Gorton’s previous poetry collection, Press Release (2007), in which a mother pays homage and bids farewell to a child who has been chosen as a ‘Hibernation Astronaut for the missile “After Life”’. She speaks poignantly of absence and relinquishment:

                           Press release, my darling,
And do not sorrow. Do not once sorrow.
If you will think of me, think only of these years
I held your unfailing present in my empty hands.
(‘Press Release’)

The next poem begins, ‘In truth, the history of space travel / is a history of rooms’ (‘The History of Space Travel’) and is spoken by a collector of artefacts for a Futures Museum. At the end of the poem, the collector speaks of listening to the voices of the dead – ‘Whispers, pleas, accusation, prayers’  – and the poet, in presenting this idea, reminds us that all speaking is destined for either silence or, in rare cases, museum collections. The idea of what-has-gone-before, of the power and pathos of living-after-the-event, is taken further in ‘Screen, Memory’ – a poem in which the corridors of the Hotel Hyperion are so similar and its technology so dedicated to showing images of people inhabiting its corridors, that the whole place is like a shifting hall of mirrors in which reality and replication almost become one, and image and physical presence are hardly distinguishable.

The poem beautifully conveys the sense that memory is a series of small self-narratives taking place, as it were, in repeating rooms and corridors. It considers how much of what we know is a re-envisaged and re-narrated set of images and stories, through which recollection dynamically constructs our identities. Such stories and imagery tend to be so self-contained, persistent and protean that some have argued that while a person’s sense of reality and self cannot exist outside of the constructs of memory, memory itself – inherently unreliable as it is – reveals that there is no reality outside of its shifting, haunting mirrors. Gorton’s poems explore and quiz this perspective.

The poem ‘Settlement, Titan’ extends this idea, claiming that the glassed-in lives of settlers on Saturn’s largest moon, lack ‘the small, slant rain that is intimate / because it does not know you’. Instead, the settlers live in a pre-set, artificial environment in which everything is predictable – even the seasons. The voice of the poem remains that of the collector, who sees such lives as a kind of dream, cut off as they are from the never-fully-knowable ‘reality’ outside of constructed spaces, and who now begins to adopt that dream by virtue of collecting ‘things’ that belong to it. Another poem, Discovery’ ponders the wreck of a space ship, in which the dead passengers have a ‘filigree of ice’ on their skin like ‘the mechanism of a clock copied in snow’ – as if, in such an artificial place, reality might begin to mimic what has been made or, at least, be seen in its light.

Then, in ‘The Futures Museum: The Sleepers’, ‘life-cast figures’ seem to mimic the passengers in the ruined vessel, bringing ‘home the strangeness of things / being motionless’. These figures are encased in ‘counterfeit ice’ and, in the poet’s conceit, become ‘votives of a stranger’s loss / Of any stranger’s loss’. Here human life, questing ambition and knowledge are largely defined by absence and enclosure. And in the concluding poems of the sequence, hallucination, hauntings and memory merge into a crystallisation of elusive loss-made existence, as if the only measure of a person might be their afterlife and remnant artefacts. Finally, even the collector is gathered up in the museum she helped to create.

As mentioned already, ‘Room and Bell’ foregrounds many of this volume’s key preoccupations. In it, Gorton returns to some of the ideas and places of childhood that she charted so beautifully in Press Release. These are six prose poems about rooms – what people remember of them; how they are constructed in the imagination; how rooms remain charged with significance even when people leave them or they are demolished. The writing is subtle, proceeding quietly and suggestively. It considers a sick child using a bell to summon others to her room, and the notion that a vanished room continues to encapsulate the idea of a ‘retreat’ and associated freedoms; it presents a ‘bland, small room’ which provides a way of entering ‘the dream that a place is mine’. There are also rooms created through, or as an accompaniment to, the act of reading – imagined places that connect to a feeling of homecoming and the idea of an ‘architecture, which is built in us’.

The final section of Hotel Hyperion, ‘The Triumph of Caesar’, takes its title from Mantegna’s series of paintings, and begins with a poem, ‘The Humanity of Abstract Painting’, that reprises some of the themes of the sequence that preceded it. This is a poem about houses, rooms, mirrors, furniture, artefacts, rain, representation and memory. Another poem in this last section, ‘Homesickness’ extends such ideas into a consideration of how the artist, Roger Hiorns, pumped huge quantities of copper sulfate into a condemned flat, which within two weeks was ‘overtaken by crystals’. For the poet, this house becomes ‘like a work of memory’ and resembles ‘patience made into a way of life’. Then, after a poem that considers freeways, childhood journeys and run-down motels – ‘Paddocks going out ignorant as clouds, / country that makes nothing and is permanent’ (‘Freeways’) – there is a three-part ekphrastic poem that finds in Mantegna’s paintings – particularly Musicians – its main points of departure. It considers the way art and life intersect and are yet not the same; how art, like the artefacts mentioned earlier in this collection, becomes a ‘gesture of remembering’.

There are, if I have counted correctly, 29 poems in this dense and richly rewarding volume. They constitute a sustained and complex exploration of how outer and inner worlds connect, of how to approach and address what we see, of the shapes and disfigurements of memory, of the links between dream, hallucination, reality and being. They are replete with persistent, transformative crystallisations.

This realisation disturbs Jo Breen, the feisty Bundjalung protagonist of Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby. Jo is new to property ownership. Having scraped together the money to buy a twenty acre block on Tin Wagon Road, she soon finds herself scraping stray gold coins off the floor of the car to buy milk. She makes a living – just – by mowing the local cemetery, content to work for a wage tending the province of Mullum’s dead white souls, despite having once haboured creative ambitions. The financial strain is worth it. Out at Tin Wagon Road, Jo treads barefoot upon her own country. She breathes it in and sets to work on it, clearing mountains of rubbish, spraying camphors, ripping out fireweed and fixing fences of her own. Jo’s labours mix her sweat with the land, impressing on the reader the idea that the relationship of Aboriginal people to their country is resilient and adaptive. It takes new forms in the present. Jo has ‘reclaimed a fragment’ of her traditional estate, she is ‘Home’, and the country responds to her presence, welcoming her. She experiences the land as vitally alive and it communicates to her through subtle signs, weather patterns and, especially, birds.

It seems to me that Lucashenko writes both with and against the perception that authentic Aboriginality is derived from the maintenance of land-based cultural practices and spiritual beliefs. In one sense, Mullumbimby is a reproach to those who seek out, romanticise and valorise versions of Aboriginal culture that are easily recognisable as examples of what the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner famously called ‘Aboriginal high culture’ – the complex religious and ceremonial life which sustained people-country relationships prior to colonial contact, and which certainly some Aboriginal people continue to maintain. Lucashenko shows that in this densely settled corner of Australia – crawling as it is with tourists, hippies, rich tree-changers and dugai (white) farmers – Aboriginal attachments to country and distinctive belief systems remain intact. They might not be immediately recognisable as such to outsiders, but their resilience – and indeed resurgence in the contemporary moment – points to a continuity with the pre-colonial past. Yet in sketching this continuity, Mullumbimby also affirms a predetermined conclusion: that land is necessarily the foundation of contemporary Aboriginal identities. This affirmation forecloses possibilities, a point to which I will return.

The occupation and possession of the country by individuals is only part of the map of contemporary land use. Mullumbimby dramatises the case of a native title claim lodged over the pockets of Crown land in the region. One of the claimants is Twoboy, a sexy black man with a sharp intellect and cruel sense of humour. His family’s claim is controversial: they have long lived elsewhere, but are seeking to reassert their status as ‘traditional owners’. Jo and Twoboy are attracted to each other and their relationship becomes intertwined with the course of the native title claim. Toward the end, the novel becomes a mystery story, as a number of the incongruous or enigmatic occurrences and comments that have been carefully placed as clues along the way reveal their significance. These pages flew fast through my fingers as Lucashenko’s fluid narrative rushed towards resolution. Jo’s teenage daughter Ellen, whom Jo parents alone, holds the key to a discovery of the ‘truth’ – that is, the single Truth that the native title claims process is seeking to establish, and which the novel is structured to ultimately reveal.

Ellen’s crucial role is surprising. For much of the novel, Jo’s relationship with Ellen is hard to fathom. Throughout Mullumbimby, Jo is engaged in a defensive inner dialogue about her relationship with Twoboy. She mulls over whether or not she is willing to allow him to dismantle her carefully built fortress, repeating to herself the mantra: ‘Good looking men. Trouble.’ While the reader is told that Jo’s love for her talented and artistic daughter is powerful and a priority, Ellen does not seem to be on her mind in the way that Twoboy constantly is. At one point, Jo observes that her daughter is a ‘typical Goorie’ (Aboriginal person) in at least one way: ‘she spoke around half as much as a white child her age.’ But given that when Ellen does blurt out how she is feeling she gets very little back in return from her mother, why would she bother talking much? The question is whether it is Jo or Lucashenko herself who is using Ellen in the service of the idea that Aboriginal ways of being are always fundamentally and essentially different from dugai ways of being. The categories of black and white remain throughout the novel, well, black and white – their content is clearly and thoroughly separated and contrasted, even though many of the characters are of mixed descent, including the ‘coffee-coloured’ Jo.

The category of Aboriginality seems, then, to be hermeneutically sealed within Mullumbimby. So much so that when a dugai shows some sensitivity of feeling, Jo wryly decides to re-categorise him as an ‘honorary Bundajalung’. She is on a slightly obsessive quest for purity. She decides that she will allow nothing but native plants to thrive on her property; all other introduced species are to be poisoned, ripped out and banished. These efforts are symbolic of her worldview. To some extent, the conclusion of the novel involves Jo admitting that these categories cannot be neatly separated out. Jo is after all a horsewoman, and the horse is an introduced species. More pointedly, Jo learns that a dugai she had dismissed as ‘landed gentry’ and expressed hostility towards is learning about Bundjalung ways and has committed himself to the restitution of Bundjalung lands. Importantly, he will do so only in death: the commitment is enshrined in his will. Even this lesson, then, which humbles Jo, seems to me to keep intact a desire for a pure state of Aboriginal being that is realised in the bond with one’s traditional country, with the white presence expunged.

It is Lucashenko’s depiction of the native title claims process that is the most riveting and significant aspect of Mullumbimby. Paradoxically, it is also the conclusion of the native title drama that crystallises the nagging issues I have outlined above. Each of these aspects of the novel deserves critical attention and I will deal with them in turn.

The novel plumbs the depths of bitterness, conflict and destruction the native title claims process too often leaves in its wake. It brilliantly captures, in a robust vernacular style, the fury and cynicism spawned by the long-lasting and emotionally exhausting claims process. ‘That lying black dogfucker is gonna learn that I’m no fool,’ says Twoboy of Oscar Bullockhead, a prominent Aboriginal figure and longtime resident in the Mullumbimby area. ‘And revenge is a dish I’m prepared to eat frozen.’

The uncomfortable fact that internecine conflicts can erupt within Aboriginal communities caught up in native title claims processes featured in Alexis Wright’s amazing experimental epic Carpentaria (2006). It is also well handled in Patti Miller’s recent memoir The Mind of a Thief (2012). Lucashenko’s realist fictional representation of the process does something quite different, and to my mind important: it captures the rawness of the lived experience and the fallout from these kinds of conflicts. Nasty threatening text messages fly, vituperation is hurled out of car windows, violence looms. The characters express bitter criticisms of the process, but become ever more bound to native title’s underpinnings.

Ultimately, within this novel, the logic of native title is destined to prevail. Things work out very neatly. At the novel’s close, it is only the Bundjalung characters who are deemed to have a legitimate relationship with the Mullumbimby area. Their actions redeem them, showing them to be fundamentally decent and honourable people. In other, non-fictional cases, however, the historical evidence produced to support native title claims has served to undermine deeply felt attachments to country held by decent and honourable Aboriginal people – longtime residents who do not have a ‘traditional’ relationship to the areas in which they live, as far as the whitefellas’ legal system is concerned. Aboriginal people have, of course, been moved by the force of historical circumstances, or have themselves moved, all over the continent. The native title legislation’s emphasis on continuity thus creates a massive problem for those most affected by colonialism’s discontinuities. This problem is far too easily resolved within Mullumbimby. Those Aboriginal characters who are not Bundjalung, but who are living on Bandjalung country, are grotesque creations with no moral legitimacy. The obese, child-molesting, cowardly figure of Bullockhead, who stands for a literally and metaphorically corrupted form of Aboriginality, is killed off.

As a reader I found myself searching the novel for some possibility that Aboriginal people might legitimately experience themselves outside of the – assumption? demand? – that they maintain attachments to and deep feelings for the land of their ancestors.  Where does this leave, I wondered, the character of Jesse, the sensitive young protagonist of Tony Birch’s Blood (2011), dragged around by his unreliable white mother, wondering about his Aboriginal father, and who shares a deep bond sealed in blood with his white sister? Is he not, as it is said in Mullumbimby, a ‘proper blackfella’? On whose terms should such a distinction be made? The formula employed within Mullumbimby has Chris, a Cadigal woman living on Tin Wagon Road, content to be adopted, again, as an ‘honorary Bandjalung’. To be adopted as honorary Bandjalung is nice, but it implies a status less than the real, unassailable thing.

Mullumbimby’s depiction of Jo’s interiority and Lucashenko’s wonderful, gritty use of language, specifically Aboriginal English, frequently reminded me of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1986). Like Hulme’s protagonist Kerewin Holmes, Jo has barricaded herself inside her own head and the stream of thoughts and cynical observations that pours forth is intertextual and richly layered. Kerewin cites the mystics and the classics; Jo reaches for song lyrics from the Classic FM hit list and Walt Whitman.

But the most obvious similarity between these works is the authors’ use of a glossary of Indigenous words. Lucashenko’s work follows the convention used in Dylan Coleman’s recently published Mazin Grace (2012), which evokes a mission childhood and is also published by the University of Queensland Press (so the convention might be UQP’s). In both novels, Aboriginal words are frequently embedded within the narrative and are not italicised, and glossaries are appended to the text. Mazin Grace and Mullumbimby share a linguistic vivacity and I think the debate over Keri Hulme’s use of Maori, which has been surveyed by Maryanne Dever, might help explain why. Some critics felt that Hulme had relegated the Maori language to a secondary status, that her act of incorporation was a denial of otherness, an absorption into a European apparatus. Dever argues against this interpretation, perceiving that the glossary preserves a space for otherness by insisting on the ‘very separateness of the Maori language’. Furthermore, the use of both English and Maori creates a sense of disjunction within the novel that confirms postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha’s point, quoted by Dever, that texts become ‘an articulation of the historical in the form of literary representation’.

The historical processes represented in The Bone People are the violence of colonialism and the destruction of language competency. The violence of colonialism is also evident in the lingua franca of Mazin Grace and Mullumbimby. However, as with The Bone People, the historical moment depicted in these literary representations speaks, not just of loss, but also of salvage and survival. The present moment, which is also historical, is a potentially exciting one, a moment of intense interest in language and cultural revival: ‘mobs all over the country,’ Jo observes, ‘were trawling in dugai libraries and dugai archives retrieving little bits of songs, stories, dances.’ She continues: ‘And yeah, theirs was a living language, true, but only barely.’ In Lucashenko’s hands, the language used to describe the world her characters inhabit is very much alive. Using phonetic spellings, Aboriginal English and Bandjalung words, Lucashenko breathes life into the language belonging to this place.

Perhaps it is the birds in Mullumbimby that have something to teach us. Mulanyin, the blue heron, lifts off the dam in morning greeting, waits for Jo on fence posts, or flaps across the paddock croaking its message. The dancing fairy wrens point Jo towards the Truth. Jo and Twoboy teach a caged parrot to say, ‘Let me out you cunts’. A lyrebird also listens and learns to reproduce a far more complex passage, passing down a talga (traditional song). And an unseen bird, perhaps a koruhmburuhm (magpie), fashions a home for itself by collecting scraps of barbed wire. These are looped and wound into an intricate, feather and down-lined nest. Those fences that bind the sliced up country tight, keeping Aboriginal people out of their country, also provide material for this bird’s nesting place.

References

Tony Birch, Blood (University of Queensland Press, 2011)
Dylan Coleman, Mazin Grace (University of Queensland Press, 2012)
Maryanne Dever ‘Violence as lingua franca: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People,’ World Literature Written in English, 29:2 (1989) 23-35.
Keri Hulme, The Bone People (Picador, 1986)
Patti Miller, The Mind of a Thief (University of Queensland Press, 2012)
Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Giramondo, 2006)

Set in Hay’s home town of Thirroul on the coast south of Sydney in 1948, The Railwayman’s Wife centres on the death of Anikka Lachlan’s husband in a mining accident and examines how Ani copes in its aftermath. Ani’s life intersects with the lives of other characters in the town, including Roy McKinnon, a war poet recently returned from the front, who now has difficulty finding any words at all to say about the world he has returned to, and Frank Draper, a doctor who is bitter from his exposure to the horrors of war and is struggling to allow love back into his life. The novel is narrated by these three characters, each of whom, while living in the present, is preoccupied with past events. Interspersed throughout the novel are also passages narrated by Ani’s dead husband, culminating at the point of his death.

Though the novel essentially belongs to Ani, the railwayman’s wife of the title, the lives of these three characters overlap beautifully and, by the novel’s conclusion, the influence each character has had on the lives of the others becomes clear. The book’s pattern is established early on: one character’s experience is later observed from another’s perspective, as in the scene in which Roy hears sobs coming from the greiving Ani’s house on a night walk he takes during a bout of insomnia. Personal experience is thus transformed into story in the way other characters interpret what they have seen. The link between the characters is also thematic. Each is asking him- or herself: what sort of living can be done in the wake of a traumatic event? This shared concern defines the book, which explores the idea that while we all live distinct internal existences, we experience many of the same emotions. Somehow, remarkably, we are all united by love and loss.

The Second World War hovers around the edges of the novel. Though it is not the book’s explicit subject, its consequences are still being felt by the characters. The war, observes Ani, is not something that can be turned off ‘like a tap’. Yet its lingering effects are also depicted as being somewhat inchoate and inexpressible. As Roy tells us, perhaps ironically for a war poet, ‘there are some things you can write about, and some you have to leave alone.’ This is echoed later in Ani’s observation that the more we hear about the war’s atrocities ‘we understand less and less of how it could possibly have happened.’

The Railwayman’s Wife is not a plot-driven novel, which is not to say it is wanting for a story; ideas occupy the pages of this novel, rather than action. Hay ploughs her subject matter for meaning. She does not overload us with material, but wrings it for its worth. For much of the book, Ani is living with the consequences of her husband’s death and the questions it raises. How will she integrate her love for and memories of her dead husband with the fact he is now gone? How can she continue to provide the love her daughter needs, while allowing herself time to grieve? At her husband’s funeral, Ani reacts against the old expression ‘time heals all wounds’, telling herself instead, ‘There were some things you carried and carried.’

Similar concerns preoccupy Roy and Frank – how can they continue living having suffered through the war? Roy, on the one hand, carries his immense sadness within him and is unable to do what he loves; Frank, on the other, vents his bitterness on those around him, whose small town lives were sheltered from effects of the war. In this way, Hay juxtaposes Ani’s small, personal loss with larger scale tragedies – ‘there are different kinds of loss,’ Ani says – and the novel seems to be asking us to consider whether there is any way of understanding the world other than at a personal level.

The Railwayman’s Wife is constructed scene upon scene, without the feeling of rushing that sometimes comes with more action-driven novels, and Hay’s writing is often beautiful, as in this shimmering sentence: ‘The paleness of her hair is so uniform that she looks as if she’s been lit from above.’ There are also many small, delicate observations about how to lead a good life, such as when Ani reminds us that one of life’s greatest pleasures is in ‘feeding a child – no-one ever tells you that’. It is almost as if Ani’s grief brings the smaller details of her life into closer and more acute focus. For much of the novel, she cannot find the words she needs to express her feelings about her husband’s death, but she can describe the world around her beautifully and, ultimately, this is the reason she prevails.

Hay gives us a wonderful sense of her home town, perched above a throbbing mass of sea. Although she alludes to D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo (1923), which Lawrence wrote during a stay in Thirroul in 1922, its legacy is not stifling. Through her descriptions, Hay claims the town as her own. There is something distinctive about its location, overlooking the ocean, yet in close proximity to the destruction wrought on the surrounding cliffs by coal mining. In this interface between nature and the terrible progress of man, Hay finds an apt symbol. The landscape speaks to that particular moment in history at the conclusion of the Second World War when man’s aptitude for destruction was most apparent: it has been ravaged by mining, the same way that some of its inhabitants have been emotionally ravaged by war and loss. The novel’s descriptions of the physical world thus seem to take on dark implications. It is hard not to read about the ‘hellish-red gates of the coke ovens’ without thinking this could easily be a reference to something else.

The ocean also plays an important symbolic role. Hay writes:

There’s some trick of perspective in this place, as if the house, the road, the grassy verge beyond were set below the level of the water, as if the sea curved up, the horizon above the line of sight and the water at any moment, about to cascade down.

The ocean thus becomes a dual metaphor for grief. It is a constant presence, a looming mass that threatens to overwhelm those who live beside it, but it also transforms what it touches. Like the lives that continue after loss, it ‘rolls and turns’. It will not stop, nor will the lives of those who live by it, although in moments of grief the characters may sometimes wish it would. Part of the symbolic significance of the ocean here has to do with the way water changes everything with time – ‘the pylons polished to smooth silver wood by the coming and going of the sea,’ for example. It is a force that both destroys and renews.

The novel is written in the third person, but drifts between the perspectives of its three main characters and that of Ani’s lost husband. Never do we feel distant, though, from the story we are being told. This is because the novel is told predominantly from Ani’s point of view, anchoring us to her, but allowing us the freedom to move beyond her perspective into the minds of the other characters. It also helps that the novel never loses sight of its key preoccupation: finding a path out of grief. It is no small achievement that Hay carries this omniscience off: it would be very easy for us to doubt the authenticity of the narrative voice as Hay moves fluidly between different points of view.

Like all skilled novelists, Hay knows what to leave out. When we learn of the death of Ani’s husband in a shunting accident, we are not given the details. It is enough for us to know that the body needs to be cremated and that those who bring Ani the news do not want to her to have to see it. And although the book has considerable emotional heft, Hay does not make the mistake of describing emotions. Instead, she lets the characters speak through their actions and reflects their states of mind in her descriptions of their surroundings. When Ani learns of her husband’s death, she says, ‘It would be easier if some part of the house had collapsed, if there was some destruction to see.’ The indirect mode of expression is not a mere stylistic choice, but an indication of one of the novel’s crucial concerns: how do we confront loss in our lives, without also destroying ourselves? It is no accident that Roy McKinnon, who writes directly about the war, is the most damaged of the book’s characters.

Until I found the book’s rhythm, I found the time shifts in the novel disorientating –  both the internal flashbacks of the characters and the passages narrated from the perspective of Ani’s husband, whom we know to be dead. But this malleability of time is intentional: we are told on the first page that this could be ‘any day, any year’, and the book does have a timeless quality. Hay allows us to inhabit her novel the way we might pass through a dream; it requires our willingness to surrender to wherever it might take us.

When Ani takes a job at the library to distract herself from her grief, another thread of meaning is woven into the narrative. The library is a place where stories are read, loaned and discussed, and Ani finds that she has a talent for matching people with stories. Astute readers will also pick up on references to literary texts peppered through the novel, such as this veiled reference to Jorge Luis Borges: ‘I’ve often wondered if paradise might not be a little like a library’; Jane Eyre (1847) is another frequently referenced text. The library patrons carry the stories of the novelists they read inside them as intimately as they carry their own. Who does a story belong to? Hay seems to be asking. The person who tells it, or the person to whom it is told? The answer appears to be both. What can be found in stories is immense solace, the ability to understand life at a deeply personal level. When Ani comes across a poem, which she reads ‘taking in whole lines in a gulp’, she assumes it has been written for her by her dead husband. It has indeed been written for her, but it is only at the novel’s conclusion that we discover its author.

Hay is developing an interesting preoccupation with threes. In her first novel, The Body in the Clouds (2010), an account of three separate lives – that of the First Fleet astronomer William Dawes, a man who witnesses the novel’s central incident, and another to whom it is told – is woven around a single moment in which a man falls from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and survives. In The Railwayman’s Wife, too, the central narrative is seen through the triple-lens of three characters. There is a sort of mathematical precision to the way these three perspectives work together: the implication is that if we look at something from three different directions, perhaps we can see its truth. This technique of allowing events to be seen from different perspectives also gives weight to the idea that a person’s life is a multidimensional story that is understood in one way by the person who lives it, and in another way when it is observed and interpreted by others. The novel is concerned with three different ways of coping with trauma, but the rule of threes is also apparent at a sentence-by-sentence level – as in the phrase ‘sleep long, and sleep well, and sleep soon’, for example – which helps to give the book its lulling rhythm.

Ultimately, it is Ani and Frank who are able to navigate their way through their grief. Ani finds solace in story and Frank Draper by surrendering to love. They are able to discover new ways of living. But Roy McKinnon, in his effort to define what happened to him in the war, seems to have been permanently harmed by it. Ani and Frank eventually find a way to understand their losses, just as the world is eventually able to move out from the shadow of the war, to reflect on the meaning of the conflict and tell stories about it. The key to the novel is the notion that it is only through narrative that we can understand ourselves at a personal level and that, through this process, can we come to terms with the world. This is the uplifting message that surges through The Railwayman’s Wife and out of the experience of loss. It shows us that not all stories about grief are desolate, that somehow, in finding a way to travel through these difficult emotions, people are capable of great things. This sense of hope is conveyed in one of the novel’s concluding sentences, aptly reminiscent of Hemingway: ‘somewhere in the world, the sun is always rising’.

Fallada was enormously popular in his day. On the back of the success of the original German editions, British publisher Putman & Co translated a run of Fallada books almost annually from Little Man, What Now? in 1933 to Iron Gustav in 1940. The only Fallada-less year for his now avid English readership in this sequence was, significantly, 1939. Putman also brought out the posthumous novel The Drinker in 1952, but by this time Fallada-mania, in the English-speaking world at least, seemed to have settled.

In 1996, Libris published a new translation by Susan Bennett of Little Man, What Now?  but it was not until the reissue in 2009 of Every Man Dies Alone, translated by Michael Hofmann, that Fallada’s resurrection was realised. Released in the UK as Alone in Berlin, it once again had Fallada’s work on the bestseller lists, this time on both sides of the Atlantic. Not bad for a writer 66 years dead. On the back of this success, a new wave of Fallada-in-English publishing began, which now includes Scribe’s reissue of the Bennett translation of Little Man, What Now? alongside The Drinker (1950) and Wolf Among Wolves (1938).

So who was Hans Fallada, a writer who for many English readers had until recently been little more than a name that appeared occasionally in the index of works by or about better known German writers? Fallada’s was a life of such tragedy and struggle, at a time of such upheaval, that it is a wonder it lasted as long as it did, until the age of 53, when he died in the now-ravaged Berlin that had both inspired and cruelled him.

*

Fallada was born Rudolf Ditzen in 1893 into a well-to-do family. His father was a judge; of an evening he and his wife would play piano together and read aloud to the children. Fallada took his pen name at the age of twenty-six and the early works written under it were largely autobiographical and much influenced by the newly-fashionable Expressionism. He later asked that they be pulped. It wasn’t until the publication in 1932 of Little Man, What Now? that he really broke into the public consciousness. It is in many ways a disarming book: the matter-of-factness of the prose, the light-heartedness of both the characters, and often the story itself, belie a life already lived that would have undone most of us.

Fallada’s troubles started – or seem to have started – with a bicycle accident at the age of fifteen. In his memoir, he relates how this incident had the effect of ‘turning my world completely upside down’ and here (as opposed to elsewhere) he seems not to be exaggerating. He collided with a butcher’s cart, ignominious enough, but then had the wheel roll over him and his face kicked by the horse. He was put on the critical list; the dizzy spells and headaches continued for some time.

At the age of seventeen, he contracted typhoid and became, according to his mother, ‘strangely changed’. He started smoking and drinking heavily, and they became lifelong addictions. A few months after this, and no doubt related, he made the first of a number of suicide attempts. He initially tried to poison himself, then cut his throat. A few months later again, he was placed in a psychiatric clinic near Weimar after he told a friend he was going to cycle out of town and hang himself (the bicycle black humour seemed to have escaped him – I hope the later memoirist smiled). Released from the clinic and enrolled in a new school near Leipzig, he declared himself at eighteen to be already ‘weary of life’. His doctor diagnosed nicotine poisoning. In October 1911, Fallada and a friend decided to shoot themselves – no, shoot each other. His friend missed; Fallada hit. He was charged with murder and put (again) into a psychiatric clinic on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He spent his nineteenth birthday in Tannenfeld Sanatorium near Jena and was released just as the rumblings began of what would soon become World War I.

In Tannenfeld, he had been writing, poems mostly, but when he got out he was thrown not into the creative and political maelstrom of contemporary Berlin or Vienna but onto a nearby dairy farm. He stayed two years. While his fellow writers were sitting in the coffee houses, Fallada was up at three in the morning milking cows. After that, it was growing potatoes. He was offered work with the Berlin-based Seed Company and at the age of twenty-three was transferred to their head office. ‘At the peak of my powers,’ he said, ‘I was able to distinguish 1200 varieties of potato and not only by name but also by their appearance.’

While in Berlin, Fallada sent his first poems to the legendary publisher, Kurt Wolff. Wolff rejected them. In 1919, a month before the Treaty of Versailles that brought the war to end all wars to an end, Fallada’s first novel, Young Goedeschal, was published by the equally-legendary Ernst Rowohlt. It came out to mixed reviews, but Rowohlt backed his author. In the rocky thirteen years before the sensation that was Little Man, What Now? he advanced Fallada money on a number of books not yet written (and went to ground when Fallada asked for more). In the meantime, his author had been in out of psychiatric clinics three more times and was, after treatment for stomach ulcers in 1918, now badly addicted to morphine. He had also spent two separate periods in prison for embezzling money to fund his addiction, with the court in the second case declaring him ‘a thoroughly degenerate psychopath’. So when, in January 1930, now clean and settled back in Berlin, he was given a job in Rowohlt’s office writing reviews, it was a break he couldn’t squander. He started a new book. He wrote it in sixteen weeks. There are other books that have famously been written faster (William Faulkner did As I Lay Dying in six), but none whose style I would suggest was more influenced, in a good way, by its hurried composition than that of Little Man, What Now?

Fallada was the first to admit that many of his life dramas had, up till then, been self-inflicted. (‘Despite all my books, despite all my opinions, I am born bourgeois,’ he said.) This was the calm after a mighty and unrelenting psychological storm. He had a job, a place to live, a wife and a newborn child. Everything in those sixteen weeks seemed to flow towards an honesty, a directness, a simplicity. Yes, he was writing for money – he had submitted an outline to Rowohlt in September 1931 and he wanted to be paid – but there is also the sense in the writing that Fallada himself was realising what a fool he had been: it was time to stop and think about what mattered.

So what did matter?

Fallada had met Anna Issel (‘Suse’) in 1928, just after his second prison term, and they married the following year. She was a working-class girl, unsophisticated, practical; he was a recovering alcoholic and morphine addict eight years her senior. He would later say of Little Man, What Now? that he set out ‘to write a novel about unemployment, but gradually and imperceptibly this book became a tribute to a woman’.

The ‘little man’ idea was very much the thing in German literature at the time – Kafka had privately lifted it to a higher plane just a few years before with his Ks – and here Johannes Pinneberg is your little man done to a ‘t’: humble, hard-working, good-natured, ‘small’. But from the first pages, we get a sense of how misleading, in fact, Fallada’s title is going to be. It is about a little man, sure, but it is equally about a little woman (and, importantly, their ‘little Shrimp’) and the extraordinary times this family of three finds itself in. You can understand why a writer in search of a subject in Berlin in the early 1930s might alight upon ‘unemployment’ – and, yes, the book is about unemployment, and underemployment, and job insecurity, and hyperinflation, and much else – but, front and centre, it is a book about the Pinnebergs doing the best they can.

Perhaps the best indication of how clear, clean and honest this novel is going to be is the opening scene, in which the gynaecologist lets Pinneberg know his soon-to-be-wife Emma Morschel (known throughout as Lammchen, or ‘lambkin’) is with child. We also get the first sense here of how Fallada is going to counterweight the light tone of his book against the dark times in which it is written. Pinneberg speaks first:

‘But it could be a mistake … Perhaps your period will start tomorrow. If it does, I’m going to write that man such a letter!’ He relapsed into thought. He was composing the letter.

After Krumperweg came Hebbelstrasse with its beautiful elm trees. The two of them walked deep in thought through the summer afternoon.

‘I shall ask for my fifteen marks back as well,’ said Pinneberg suddenly.

Lammchen did not reply. She was concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other and taking great care where she walked. Everything was so different now.

‘He relapsed into thought. He was composing the letter.’ ‘She was concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other and taking great care where she walked.’ The beauty is in the detail – and how beautiful is it? It is as if, with all the big noise going on in the background, Fallada felt the need to come up with something small, quiet, breezy, light. Its lightness almost amounts to an act of defiance.

*

When Fallada handed the final draft of Little Man, What Now? to Rowohlt in early 1932 there were eight and half million people unemployed in Germany. By 1933, a staggering 40 per cent of the population was registered as out of work. What cannot be forgotten about Little Man, What Now? is that, aside from its coming out of the mad black fog of Fallada’s personal circumstances, the book was written and published just as one of history’s greatest political upheavals was rumbling over the horizon.

During those interwar years, while Fallada’s life became an unhinged mix of psychiatric clinics, prisons, morphine and manual labour, the country itself was fitting and spasming, only to rise from its fevered sick bed in the early 1930s with a wild look in its eye. In 1923, just as Fallada was about to start his first prison term for embezzlement, Hitler announced himself clumsily with his Munich Beer Hall Putsch; by 1924, when Fallada was in prison and Hitler himself was behind bars writing Mein Kampf, inflation had run so wildly out of control that the government created a new currency, the ‘Rentenmark’, by knocking twelve zeros off the old. In 1929, as Suse had fallen pregnant and the couple was preparing to make Berlin their home, the Wall Street Crash sent millions to the dole queue. By 1932, when Little Man, What Now? hit the shops, Hitler had pulled nearly 37 per cent of the popular vote in the presidential elections. One year later, with the Reichstag fire, the Nazi dictatorship began.

In bad times like these, how do little people get by? It was in Fallada’s close-up look at how a small-time white-collar husband and wife deal with difficult days that he struck a chord with his public. Here, for example, is the newly-married couple’s first conversation about what each member might bring to the union, economically-speaking:

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘No, you tell me first,’ she said.

‘I …’ he began, then broke off.

‘Oh, please tell me!’ she begged.

‘It’s really very little. Perhaps even less than you.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘Oh, yes it can.’

Some time later, the pregnant Lammchen has an uncontrollable craving for salmon. Pinneberg has by now lost his job but, despite the massive expense at a time of serious belt-tightening, he agrees they should have it together for supper that very evening. Lammchen hurries off to buy the salmon. But when she comes back, something is wrong. Pinneberg finds her in the hallway ‘holding out a wax-paper wrapper shining with grease-marks but with nothing in it’:

‘Oh gosh, Lammchen, what’s the matter? Did the salmon fall out of the paper?’

‘I ate it,’ she sobbed. ‘I ate it all, by myself.’

‘Like that, out of the paper? Without any bread? The whole quarter? But Lammchen!’

‘I ate it,’ she sobbed. ‘All by myself.’

Time and again these small foreground details give us hints of the bigger picture outside, and even more so when, not long after this, the couple and their ‘Shrimp’ move to Berlin to look for work. Fallada seems to be pushing the domestic deliberately into the centre of frame. By doing so he ensures that we experience the big messy stuff at the edges, not as an abstraction, but as a felt thing, the way the characters themselves are feeling it.

A comparison here with Fallada’s contemporary Bertolt Brecht is instructive. (So far as we know, they never met, although Brecht’s collaborator, Kurt Weill, was originally contracted to write the score for a 1933 film adaptation of Little Man, What Now?) The general view, as another contemporary Walter Benjamin put it, was that Brecht’s work was all about ‘producing astonishment rather than empathy’. But it could equally be argued that in his stories from the 1920s and ’30s Brecht was in fact all about empathy, despite (or indeed because of) what Willett and Manheim in the introduction to their English language collection called a ‘conscious naivety’ and ‘lack of affectation’. It is a style that has uncanny echoes with Fallada.

After reading Little Man, What Now? I kept thinking about where else I had experienced this distinguishable ‘tone’. Then I remembered an old Brecht favourite, his 1938 story Socrates Wounded, which is as much about his wife Xanthippe as the great Socrates himself, and where the big war with the Persians takes a back seat to the knowing husband-and-wife banter. (Socrates has been shouldered back from the battle as a hero but the truth is he had turned tail in the dark and ran into a thorn bush; Xanthippe, with her wifely instincts, is on to him.) Like Fallada, Brecht is often celebrating what we might call the heroism of the unheroic. His Mother Courage is the exemplar of the basically good-hearted character in troubled times doing her best to ‘get by’ and – contra Benjamin on ‘astonishment and empathy’ – I challenge anyone to watch, for example, the death of Mutter’s mute daughter, Kattrin, without tearing up. It is exactly the ‘lack of affectation’ that affects us.

*

No one here in Australia from a socio-economic stratum below middle class could read Little Man, What Now? and not recognise in it a thousand tiny moments. For anyone who has just seen their latest electricity bill, been to a medical specialist and paid ‘the gap’, watched their super go down the sink or listened to an interminable Bach sonata on Centrelink’s ‘help’ line will appreciate the scene where Pinneberg ‘in the mammoth hall, as small and shabby a figure as you could wish for’ tries to get a hundred marks back on his health insurance. (‘We deal in millions here,’ says the god-like voice in his head ‘and your hundred marks are of no importance to us whatever.’) Or when, in one of Fallada’s less-guarded moments, he lets Pinneberg say: ‘Poverty is not just misery, poverty is an offence, poverty is a stain.’

The effect of ‘big economics’ on ‘little people’ doesn’t go away. The book might be eighty years old and counting but – plus ça change – it smells as fresh to me as this morning’s news. A major stock market crash just a few years earlier, a labour market drifting further into insecurity, deep inequities in the distribution of wealth (‘“A bit more justice would do no harm at all,” thought Lammchen’), politicians loudly praising the ‘little people’ while at the same time bashing their advocates, the trade unions; and finally, and inevitably, the rise of right-wing extremist thought. In the absence of much political literature getting published in this country, Little Man, What Now? could almost serve as a model for the way we might speak, with no intellectual pomposity, about things mostly unspoken: the growing gap between rich and poor, the increasing casualisation and insecurity of the workforce, the growth of a new outer suburban underclass.

Here is the heartbreaking moment in the book where the Pinnebergs’ old landlady, Mrs Scharrenhofer, finds her savings ravaged by inflation. She just doesn’t understand (and let’s face it, who could?), explaining to the Pinnebergs how before the war she had ‘a comfortable fifty thousand marks’:

‘And now that money’s all gone. How can it be all gone?’ she asked anxiously. ‘An old lady can’t spend that much, can she?’

‘Inflation,’ said Pinneberg, cautiously.

‘It can’t have all gone,’ said the old lady, unheeding.

‘I sit here reckoning it up. I’ve written it all down. I sit here, reckoning. Here it says: a pound of butter: three thousand marks … can a pound of butter cost three thousand marks?’

‘In the inflation …’ began Lammchen, joining in.

‘I’m going to tell you. I now know that my money’s been stolen. Somebody who rented here stole it.’

The old lady thinks her money has been stolen, and in a funny way, she’s right. It has been stolen, not by some unscrupulous tenant, as she suspects, but by something far bigger and harder to understand. It has been stolen by the wildfire of free market economics. Try telling the policeman that.

References

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (Pimlico, 1999).
Bertolt Brecht, Collected Short Stories, edited by John Willett & Ralph Manheim (Methuen, 1983).
Martin Kitchen, A History of Modern Germany (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Jenny Williams, More Lives Than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada (Libris, 1998).

Some ten years later, I was in the audience at the Anthill Theatre in South Melbourne watching Margaret Cameron perform Ulrike Meinhof Sings by Christopher Barnett. Ten years is not such a long time. Certainly in Germany, as late as 2005, the exhibition, Regarding Terror: The Red Army Faction, which included Gerhard Richter’s controversial paintings of the dead Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, provoked families of RAF victims to campaign against the show. In Australia, far removed from the repercussions of RAF actions, ten years was long enough for the process of mythologising to begin: art was being made of der Rote Armee Fraktion and Ulrike Meinhof’s revolutionary polemic.

The playwright, Christopher Barnett, enfant terrible of the Melbourne punk arts scene in the 1980s, left Australia in 1990 and continues to work as a writer and activist in self-imposed exile in France. In 2011, during the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Nadia Townsend reprised Barnett’s Meinhof:

I wanted to destroy
to destroy
to destroy the buildings where my lovers shrink
to destroy the streets where my lovers fell
to destroy the earth built to drain my lovers’ arms
to destroy constructions where my lovers explode
I needed to build an earth to strengthen my lovers’ arms

Meinhof’s song of 1986 is a chant, a diatribe, a call to arms. The lines Marion May Campbell writes for Meinhof in konkretion have a different quality: her Meinhof dances towards self-erasure, speechlessness, silence. If Barnett’s Meinhof is the heroic destroyer, then Campbell’s Meinhof is closer to self-destruction:

My new blankness is close to holy.
I’ve put my mouth in the gutter, to show Gudrun I’ve come a long way, baby.
One must write or be written; one must write out or be written out!
I’ll not be written out by them; I’ll write myself cleanly out so there is only revolutionary fervour left.
The afterglow of the emptied page!

In 1986, Meinhof is a trope for revolution. By 2013, she has become a shade; the mortified female-body in the process of disintegration. That gap of nearly thirty years expresses the difference, to paraphrase Guy Debord, between poetry at the service of the revolution and the revolution at the service of poetry. The language of revolution has acquired the patina of a quaint artifact. Meinhof once scrawled ‘tone just too hysterical’ across a poem by Ensslin. Contemporary sensibilities seem to find revolutionary polemic not only hysterical, but somewhat ridiculous. The irony is that the Baader-Meinhof Gang has now become a commodified brand (reproductions of their wanted posters can be purchased from the online store at www.baader-meinhof.com), subject to the power they most dreaded: capitalism. It goes to show that there is a fashion in revolution as much as there are fashion trends in literature and criticism.

Recently, at The Real Through Line poetry symposium in Melbourne, Felicity Plunkett said that non-fiction poetry is kept alive by the ghosts of the real. Reality, it might be inferred, provides poetry and fiction with a narrative scaffold from which a truth greater than the sum of facts might be derived. During the same symposium, the poet πo promoted the idea of a novel contained within a poem, his version of Shakespeare’s ‘the object of art is to give life a shape’. Facts, he said, are material for poetry, but reality is not truth. The facts of Meinhof’s life provide Campbell with a foundation from which to unravel the skeins of her ideas.

The novella konkretion contains the promise of a novel, a dramatic monologue, poem(s) and the ghosts of several lives. It is a matryoshka doll of refracting voices with Meinhof’s story nestled at its core. The word konkretion contains konkret, the left-wing magazine founded by Meinhof’s husband, Klaus Ranier Röhl, and is the German for concretion, meaning the process of coalescence, of making something real or substantial. Konkret/concrete has not only the weight of the building material, but also of an experience made tangible through the process of writing. The novella as container, or edifice for confinement (a prison for the story), is constructed in a process analogous to architectural or sculptural practice.

konkretion begins in the terminus of Charles de Gaulle airport. Like the train station at the beginning of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), the airport is vast and impersonal. Monique Piquet sits and contemplates the indignities of ageing. For a moment she feels ‘characterless’. To pass from this liminal space, she need a ‘fictional sheath’ strong enough to hold her identity together. Her work as an academic and writer is in doubt. Her ‘pearls-and-tweed’ literary agent has insisted she write about ‘proper’ characters. Like Brian Castro’s alter-ego Brendan Costa in Street to Street (2012), she laments the state of literary publishing in Australia and her own lack of success. Like Costa, she sees poetry and literary fiction as ‘the cultivation of failure, the work of endless patience and attentiveness’. Her colleagues’ scorn makes her ‘seethe with rage’. The plot of her vaguely lesbian road-novel is in danger of imploding. Can a character’s own words save her? asks the writer whose most successful construct is herself: Monique Piquet, we discover, is the deliberate translation of plain Monika Pickett. It is the name of a stylish agent provocatrice and the mask behind which Pickett hides. Pickett is too obvious a reminder of the picket line, the peg, the post. Piquet is the character’s escape from the confines of the picket fence; she will not be ‘nicely narrated’ or easily domesticated.

Piquet has returned to Paris to escape the embarrassment of a public debacle in Sydney. Invoking Walter Benjamin, she becomes a flâneur wandering the streets, the passing geography a guide to her inner landscape. The would-be muggers and improbable saviours she encounters give shape to her ruminations on life, sex, relationships, failure, fear in general – and her fear, in particular, of meeting her former student, Angel Beigesang, who has written a successful book about Meinhof.

Following in Campbell’s discursive footsteps, I have the fancy that ‘Monique Piquet’ may also be an allusion to author Maurice Pinguet – the phonetic resemblance of the two names is too good to pass up. Pinguet is best know for his study of seppuku or Japanese ritual suicide: death written across the belly with the calligraphic gesture of a slashing knife. And Piquet’s unravelling is a minor-suicide of sorts; the necessary death of the ancien régime to make way for the new. Campbell uses the body as a metaphor for writing; writing the story becomes a consolation and a means of escape from the body’s confines and infirmities. To move ahead it is necessary to ‘unwrite, unwalk the clotted circulation; undo the blockage of old stories.’

Academic credentials give Piquet licence to cite every writer of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who might have piqued (Piquet-ed?) her interest. The authors’ names – Mallarmé, Kafka, Celan, Adorno, Apollinaire, Serres, Artaud, Irigaray, Lacan, Benjamin, Lautréamont, Leduc, de Beauvoir and Sartre, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Mina Loy, Wittig, Duras, Sarraute, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, Genet, Marcuse, Reich, Rimbaud, Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Brecht, Beckett, Bachmann, Ponge, Camus, Sebald, Bataille – are strung through the text like a map to exotic locations. A multiplicity of meanings can be extrapolated from Piquet’s extra-textual referents. Even for readers without a background in modernist literature or French cultural theory, the insistent naming creates a rhythmic counterpoint to Piquet’s interior monologue.

Alluding to texts beyond the story may also be Campbell’s way of escaping the confines of traditional narrative, shattering the form from within. Meaning is accrued through the reverberations set up by naming and punning. When Piquet reflects on Francis Ponge’s influence on her early poems and finds herself ‘ex-ponged’, or when she rants about Beckett’s need to ‘reJoyce’ himself, Campbell’s wordplay seems awkward and overly contrived. But eliciting a cringe of embarrassment may well be her intention.

Piquet is obsessed with her ex-student Angel Beigesang’s ‘lowbrow’ success and her part in Beigesang’s radicalisation, yet the corporeal Beigesang is curiously absent. She lives only through Piquet’s scrutiny of her writing. In a way, Beigesang has been erased by her immersion in Meinhof’s consciousness: ‘I was going down and dirty, and I dreamed myself as her, as Ulrike Meinhof, crawling under the barbed wire of her convoluted sentences, through the thicket of her reasoning and out into the insane spaces.’ Piquet reads this and flinches. ‘This is no heroine’s story,’ she writes in the margin of the text. Meinhof was driven by a desire to outrun her bourgeois origins, by her desperation to belong, Piquet continues in a one-way conversation. Was disowning personal grief and admitting public anger enough to catapult Meinhof into monster-dom? she asks. Piquet identifies with Meinhof’s instability; Beigesang is in thrall to anyone destructive. Beigesang’s Meinhof text and interview stand in for her person; like Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘ptyx’ (another of Piquet’s obsessions), she is the mysterious presence who may exist only in Piquet’s fevered imagination.

Der Gesang is German for singing and ‘Beigesang’ might, at a pinch, be interpreted as ‘singing together’. Piquet and Beigesang are, after all, two sides of the same coin: age and youth, conservatism and rebellion, intellect and action. konkretion abounds with multiples, reflections and dichotomies, such as hospitality and hostility, hostage and host. The body, the ego, human relations are all fragile. To refuse help is tantamount to refusing contact. ‘Reciprocity binds,’ says Piquet, and concludes that connection may be the only way to redeem the past, the only way forward. Even the most mundane cause for shared mirth, the rantings of a disgruntled youth on a bus, for example, is a source of the connection which enables the survival of grief and pain. Truth, according to Georges Bataille, ‘is not to be found where humans consider themselves in isolation; it starts with conversations, shared laughter, friendship, eroticism and only takes place by passing from one to the other.’

Another truth is that revolution is seductive and that death is moving, even the death of a murderer, and especially one who began her life as the serious critic of a flawed society unable to deal with the aftermath of its atrocious history. What might have changed, asks Beigesang, if Meinhof had found a poetry which could ‘channel her refusal, her despair, her outrage, a circuitry through the body, a red irrigation of poetry as sensation?’ The cynic in Piquet (and me) would remind her that teenagers with Che and Ulrike posters on their bedroom walls grow up to be lawyers, developers and politicians; that poets of the revolution end up in the boardroom.

When Piquet does finally meet up with her protégé, she is disarmed by Beigesang’s genuine warmth and amused by her antiquated Australian vernacular. She admits to the delusion of having invented Beigesang: ‘I’ve been sleepwalking through these last days and I don’t know what I’ve dreamed up anymore and what actually I’ve lived through. I even started to think I wrote your stuff.’ Her habitual mask of disdain slips to reveal a fragile and disintegrating ego.

The edifice of konkretion is composed of slabs and spaces, fragments, silences, masquerades. It is an infinity of Chinese boxes, of texts embedded within the text and meanings radiating out beyond the narrative. It is also a novella of grief – over losses, deaths, love withheld and love withdrawn – and of the failure of parents, patriarchies, governments, lovers and especially mothers, be they biological, adoptive or academic. konkretion might be a humanist novella masquerading as a postmodernist text: at its heart is the idea of language and politics betrayed by materialism and commercialisation.

Campbell gives a survivor, Felix Ensslin, Gudrun’s son, (almost) the last word: ‘the measure of your humanity is what you make of the stories you inherit.’ Like Scheherazade, Campbell deliberately offers another chance: ‘Maybe in the next draft …’ With this tantalising farewell, Campbell hands over the story to see what we might make of it, in whatever way we can, as readers, writers or artists. For my part, the words of Louise Bourgeois suffice: ‘Art is a guaranty [sic] of sanity.’

References

Christopher Barnett, ‘Ulrike Meinhof Sings, Nadia Townsend performance,’ Melbourne Fringe Festival (2011) .
Louise Bourgeois, ‘Art is a guaranty of sanity,’ crayon on paper (2000).
Brian Castro, Street to Street (Giramondo, 2012).
Vincent Kaufmann, ‘Angels of Purity,’ Guy Debord and the situationist international: texts and documents, edited by Tom McDonough (MIT Press, 2004).
Annika Priest, ‘Fitzroy poet and playwright, enfant terrible Christopher Barnett’s work caught on film,’ Melbourne Leader (6 February 2013).
Maurice Pinguet, Voluntary Death in Japan (Basil Blackwell, 1993).
Felicity Plunkett, ‘Host and Ghost: Hospitality, Reading and Writing,’ The Real Through Line: A Poetry Symposium, Monash University Centre for Australian and Postcolonial Writing and RMIT (5 April 2013).

Prepare the Cabin for Landing does not disappoint on any count. Alan Wearne’s formalism is as innovative and as flexible as ever, and the novelistic tendencies of his poetry are in evidence in the the collection’s two long sequences. The book contains much that one would expect from a poet who is unashamedly influenced by nineteenth century models – Browning, Meredith and Clough come immediately to mind – and he also draws on the previous century’s Dr. Johnson, whose ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, based on Juvenal’s tenth satire, is the model for ‘The Vanity of Australian Wishes’, which makes up the last section of the book. In fact, it seems to be an increasingly dominant feature of Wearne’s poetry that it is preoccupied with the past, drawing on it for much (though not all) of its subject matter and for its most salient influences (although how one’s influences could ever come from the future is a mystery, unless the inventiveness of this collection is such that one poem, ‘Love is in the Air’, suggests such a way). This is not a weakness; on the contrary, it is what gives the book its obvious energy. It is refreshing to read poems that are not afraid to talk on familiar terms with the past.

The prosody of the book, on the whole, has a kind of virtuosic roughness, which is just right for this kind of satire. Take, for example, the first stanza of ‘Dysfunction, North Carlton Style or, The Widow of Noosa’:

I’d love you to meet this exemplary couple
swinging and sexy and very well liked.
Here in a suburb where values quintuple
over thirty plus years and they still haven’t spiked

I read the first line as amphibrachic, the second dactylic (with a masculine stress ending on ‘liked’), ditto the third (with a final trochaic foot), and the last perfectly anapestic. The overall structure is that of the ballad, but there is a controlling ear with a more nuanced understanding of what makes a stanza work. Elsewhere, the variety is pushed to further limits. Take this example from ‘“All these young Australianists…”’:

And yes sometimes I fear it’s shuddering beyond control: this Creative
Industries / that Arts Practice,
and I do yearn to return to those days when all it required was just loving
the stuff,
and though I’m up for supporting each delegate whatever their act is,
‘JYW,’ I say to myself, ‘enough’s decidedly enough …’

These extremely long lines – I make it, in terms of stresses, ten, eight, eight and ten, but you might make it otherwise – dare us to stuff it up, and one of the pleasures of this book is reading lines with the stresses of conversational speech and then re-reading with a scansion that suggests other emphases or meanings. For example, the first line above could be taken to be iambic pentameter up as far as the colon, becoming trochaic after that (it’s possible – try it), thus enacting the distrust and frustration of the narrator at the level of prosody.

Mixing and matching your meters could be, for some readers of poetry, a sign of a lack of control, but I reckon Wearney pulls it off. The feeling of heterogeneity and, oddly enough, imperfection, which permeates many of the poems is, in fact, the result of his minute attention to prosodic detail, and I feel that this is one of Wearne’s distinctive achievements in this book. He gives the appearance of an occasional looseness, or haphazardness, or writes lines which seem to exceed the space which should have been allocated them, but which somehow just manage to work, to scan on a re-read, and then to make sense. It is not often, in recent times, that I have read a review that necessitated a discussion of the prosody of the work in question. It is a sign of Wearne’s skill that, to do justice to his work, I seem to have no choice other than to do just that.

The book is divided into four sections. The first consists of four poems, all more or less dramatic monologues and satires. These range from ‘A Portrait of Three Young High School Teachers’, which deals with a group of female school teachers in the early 1960s, to the jaunty narrative ‘Dysfunction, North Carlton Style or, The Widow of Noosa’, which charts the story of a swinging couple from Carlton, who open their marriage, grow old and (in the case off the husband, at least) die. ‘The God of Nope’ is narrated by a ‘onetime junior partner’ of the notorious Nugan Hand Bank, and ‘“All these young Australianists…”’, an amusing satirical portrait, is narrated for the most part by Janice Y. Wilde, an Australianist academic and ‘partner’ of ‘critic, novelist and naturally poet Ted Tucker’ who observes with some bemusement the goings-on at this year’s conference:

Indeed. Who was last year’s silly girl (Bree Mumby? Simone Wigg?)
that allowed herself to be churned into gossip’s hideous anti-matter?
Wouldn’t wish to deny any child her trophy jiggety-jig
but to leeech onto Tristram, Tristram Heyhoe, Trans-Tasmanist and decades-perpetual satyr,

a throwback’s throwback, beyond misogyny…

Academia has always been an easy target, but Wearne enlivens his satire with a feisty ottava rima ballad, penned by Ted and inserted into the middle of the poem, which features the jaunty refrain ‘We’re both on a Fellowship, ho!’ We can read the poem as a satire of academia as it is now (or was just a little while ago), or as a curious celebration of the ‘cultural strut’ which in some areas has replaced the cultural cringe. Either way – or both – it’s a romp of a read.

All of the poems in this section are in rhyme, with ‘The God of Nope’ organised into tercets and the rest in long-lined quatrains. The rhymes are generally tight and amusing: ‘Kama Sutra’d’ rhymes with ‘putrid’, ‘Ohio’ with ‘Clio’, ‘poet’ with (you guessed it) ‘know it’, and ‘satyr’ with ‘anti-matter’. These and other rhymes zing with a kind of trans-cultural brio, or at other times with a kind of knowing buffoonery, all of which is mightily entertaining.

The first poem could be a link to the second section, ‘Operation Hendrickson’, a long poem in which Wearney himself appears as a character. The narrator is Robert ‘Henn’ Hendrickson, and the story follows Henn and his chums – including Wearney, who is depicted putting together a ‘rag’ called ‘Proper Gander’ – from their early-1960s schooldays through to their later, disappointing years. There is the implication within the poem that Wearney is himself the author of this memoir of Henn, even though Henn narrates. The last words of the poem belong to Henn, telling Wearney his ‘ever-essential motto’: ‘Don’t like it? Don’t do it. For Wearney, that’s what it’s all about.’

The third section, ‘And the Hits Just Keep Coming’, consists of seven poems based on Australian pop-songs. These are a continuation of the Pop Song sequence from The Australian Popular Songbook (2008). Because Wearne is so good at what he does in the other sections –  dramatising, novelising and satirising – these poems do not at first appear as substantial as the others in the book, but the explanatory notes at the back give specific contexts for them and show them to be doing something different. Among them, ‘Love is in the Air’, dedicated to the speaker of the poem in 2040 AD, when she would be thirty years old, is the most appealing. It takes a fond, nostalgic look back at the present from the perspective of the future, a kind of paradigm for the narrative frame of many of the poems in the book. I also particularly liked ‘Howzat’ which, the notes tell us, is ‘the Shane Warne poem … what else?’

The final and most substantial section is ‘The Vanity of Australian Wishes’, which leap-frogs the Augustan sensibility of Samuel Johnson’s poem to embrace the more scabrous irritability of Juvenal. This literary opalisation makes it clear that we are meant to understand the poem as belonging to a tradition, and that its mode of operation may well be inhabiting that established by its precursors. This proves to be largely true. The notional setting of the satire is on board an aircraft coming into land, an allusion to the panoptic purview of its predecessors, and this allows the poem to range freely across time and space. The central characters are chosen from a narrow band:

Diggah, a multi-substanced sportzstar, V’roomv’room
some  ex-ex would be-would be supermodel,
Annabel-Kate this very former CEO turned opinion-piecer,
and Chad: that bankrupted motivational speaker poised
at the edge of the slammer. Plus big-noter, small-timer
I am if you are and you better be hahaha
bagman slagman liar thief…
thirty, forty, fifty years on from 6A,
our very own self-proclaimed King o’ th’ Rooters
Sssnowy!

At first, one might mistake these characters for mere caricatures of some aspects of popular culture, but their stories are more detailed, more personal and, dare I say it, believable than their typicality might suggest. Considered alongside ‘“All these young Australianists…”’, ‘The Vanity of Australian Wishes’ brings to mind Swift’s definition of satire as a ‘sort of glass, wherein beholders generally discover everybody’s face but their own’. But Wearne is one step ahead of us, and near the end of the poem, he recasts Swift’s phrase thus:

We may not be them but they are surely us,
and with that paradox we just might muddle on
to our survival knowing You are who you are not.
Get it?

We do get it, and this is what makes satire work. As with Pope’s use of proper names in The Dunciad, where a reader might initially think it is necessary to know who Blackmore, Cibber, Oldmixon or Milbourn actually were – even though it is not, in the end, absolutely necessary – one does not have to know who Wearne’s characters are meant to represent. In the hands of a talented poet-satirist, the satirical form is of as much interest in itself as what is being satirised, which is the case with this book. Having said that, I would not mind seeing someone like Wearne take on some targets closer to home (our defamation laws may make that too difficult, although he has already published a sketch in prose: ‘The Chart: a reply to Jamie Grant’).

The collection’s final poem also has another frame: that of the death of the author’s friend and fellow poet, John Forbes, and how this occurred on the same afternoon as the burial of Melbourne gangster Alphonse Gangitano, whose death sparked the gang war depicted in the television series Underbelly. The weaving together of these two events, in combination with the aircraft narrative, has an unexpected effect, which is what makes this section the best part of the collection.

Prepare the Cabin for Landing is a really impressive book. While it shares with Wearne’s previous collection, The Australian Popular Songbook, the quality that Pam Brown describes as being ‘nostalgic for decades-old popular culture’, this is precisely the energetic spine which runs through it and makes possible the construction of so many interesting and beautiful works of art.

References

Alan Wearne, ‘The Chart: a reply to Jamie Grant,’ Southerly, vol. 60, no. 1 (2000) 151.

Now, over a decade since Autobiography of Red caused a sensation, Carson has returned to the characters from her most popular verse narrative. Red Doc> is offered as a sequel that ‘continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names’. With these words Carson declares her lack of interest in standing still. Red Doc> displays some of the recognisable traits that pervade her work, but in its pages the central characters of Autobiography of Red are transformed from their mythic identities as Geryon and Herakles into G and Sad (full name: Sad But Great). With this renaming – arguably a dwindling – Carson’s protagonists move out of the heroic mode and carry with them a sense of disappointment.

Red Doc> is a reunion, but it also an elegy and an adventure story that leads its protagonists from G’s little red hut to a glacier, down an ice fissure, into a private psychiatric clinic, and then to the hospital bedside of G’s mother, Ida. Ida brings G and Sad back together, and when they leave her behind, ostensibly for a day trip, she eventually follows them. She is ‘filled with / mood like a very tough / experimental baby’; she makes things happen.

Yet despite the book containing a deal of absurd action, it is hard to categorise Red Doc> as a work in which much really happens. The relationships between characters old and new do not go much beyond a surface gloss. Only the late appearance of G’s mother reveals a relationship that remains fraught. From the opening pages of Autobiography of Red to the close of Red Doc>, the relationship between mother and son retains the frisson that seeps from the erotic relationships Carson portrays. The weird tension the poet captures between stasis and action, past and present, is the book’s achievement. Any kind of plot summary would be beside the point.

Red Doc> is Carson’s first volume of new poetry since Decreation (2005), though a number of books have appeared in the interim: Grief Lessons (2006), her translations of four tragedies of Euripides, the facsimile of her handmade book Nox (2010), and Antigonick (2012), which, in telling the story of Sophocles, edges into the realm of graphic novel. The Euripides and Sophocles books are translations or adaptations, while Nox appeared out of sequence, having taken a decade to find its way into print. The original book was first accepted and then lost by a publishing company. It was found again and ended up in the hands of another imprint, New Directions, which published it in one of the most luxuriously produced volumes of poetry in recent memory.

Nox was firmly elegiac, addressing Carson’s sense of loss after the death of her brother; Decreation retained the elegiac tone, but was more of a grab bag of poems and essays. Taking up the last third of the book was the title work: an opera libretto about Sappho, the medieval mystic Marguerite Porete, and the philosopher and ascetic Simone Weil. In many ways, Red Doc> continues in the style of that libretto, mixing tender narrative with more absurd moves that at times border on slapstick. Amid the operatic unfolding of ‘Decreation’, multiple choruses of papal inquisitors, invisible tap-dancers and female robots (assistants to the Greek god Hephaistos) deflated the plaintive tone. In a similarly comical spirit, Red Doc> presents us with ‘ice bats’ that emerge from and retreat to their home inside a glacier, BATCATRAZ. These bats make conspicuous the mechanical workings of the plot as it transports the reader into new realms. Their appearances also serve to puncture any veneer of seriousness or self-importance that might seem to emerge in the poetry, and suggest that Carson is well-aware of the expectations weighing down new publications, especially one revisiting her most popular work.

While these comical incursions destabilise the work, the focal point of the book remains G and his sensibility of ‘redness’. Still distinguished by his unforgettable red wings (‘THEY’RE RED / no / is he / red / yes / wings / yes // okay I do know this guy’), he remembers his mother with ‘her ashtray her red velour / bathrobe’. He ventures out from his ‘red hut’, thinks with his ‘redletter brain’, writes with a red pencil, and exhibits ‘red sadness’. Still, the hue is not as insistently present in the new work. Another diminishment.

Where Autobiography of Red took as its primary form the alternation of long and short lines, the narrative of Red Doc> is presented in slim columns of text that unfurl down the centre of the page. The opening poem is a dialogue between two unnamed voices that makes it clear that Carson is aware of the pitfalls of sequels. One voice announces that he has ‘finished Proust’; his interlocutor replies ‘well I’m / not fond of those multivolume things’ and goes on to claim that she has ‘read all the Len / Deightons in the library’. Our ability to distinguish these voices grows slowly as the text proceeds, though they often remain undifferentiated and become jumbled again. Carson’s thin columns reduce the impact of line breaks, enhance the occasional confusion of the voices of the text.

In addition to this main text, Red Doc> also features the periodic voice of the Wife of Brain, whose centre-aligned poems act as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action, orienting the reader and punctuating the story. After the opening dialogue between G and Ida, the Wife of Brain appears immediately to reintroduce the figures from Autobiography of Red:

but
remember
the following faces
the red one (G)
you already know (what’s he done to his hair) his old friend
Sad
But Great
looks kind
beware
third Ida Ida is limitless and will soon be our king

Here the Wife of Brain offers directorial instruction: the dramatis personae are defined, though other characters will enter the fray as the story proceeds. Carson also uses this voice to place the reader in time and space, as when she writes that the ‘scene is / a little red hut where G lives alone / time / evening’. Elsewhere, the Wife of Brain alerts the reader to the ‘first reversal’ of the text when the ‘short road trip’ envisioned by G and Sad becomes an Odyssey that leads them into a ‘private [psychiatric] clinic’. This first reversal signals a shift in our expectations of the text and is a warning that there are more such shifts to come. The choral voice is arch: the Wife of Brain knows the unfolding story – a tragedy of sorts – and knows the story we have already heard. She is the most playful of the book’s voices: within the constant form of her single-stanza commentaries, she varies her mode of expression. Here the narrative framework is laid bare; there she gives a catalogue of military rations. Or she falls into a schoolyard-chant-like anaphora, as when she sings:

They drank bright mead in cups of gold
They drank bright mead to catch his shrieks
They drank bright mead what kind of knife
They drank bright mead between his cheeks

Carson’s awkwardness is often her virtue; at moments like this, however, one wonders if her awkwardness is just, well, awkward.

During the course of the book, G’s voice is emerges as the most recognisable. This is in large part because we are privy to his emotional responses to the action we witness. He also reflects on the texts Carson invokes as counterpoints to her narrative, comparing his own experiences to the work of Marcel Proust and Daniil Kharms. This is a regular feature of Carson’s writing. From her use of the collected works of Emily Brontë in ‘The Glass Essay’ from Glass, Irony and God (1992) to her fascination with John Keats’s marginalia in The Beauty of the Husband (2001), her poetry has been in constant conversation with other sources, be they from literature, film or the visual arts. Though Red Doc> comes with a half page of notes identifying Carson’s in-text allusions, end notes are often not necessary, as she embeds her citations in the text. G’s explicit reflections on the work of Proust, in particular, speak to his reflections on his own life. In Search of Lost Time becomes a touchstone at crucial moments, such as when G reflects on his reaction to watching Sad sleep by comparing it to Proust’s account of Albertine: Carson paraphrases the scene explicitly.

But it is Kharms’s work and life that more fully informs the tone of Red Doc>. When G contemplates the book in his hands Carson writes

WEIGHING IT IN his
hand he pauses then
throws it across the room.
Does he hate Today I
Wrote Nothing: The
Selected Writings of
Daniil Kharms translated
from the Russian by
Matvei Yankelevich for
some good reason or for
not being Proust.

This ambivalence towards Kharms – as G spends more time with the Selected Writings, Carson tells us ‘He still / hates the book but is / beginning to love the man’ – reflects the uneasy relationship Red Doc> has to the absurd. Kharms’s influence is evident in the bats retreating to BATCATRAZ and the moment in which the ox, Io – the only named member of G’s herd – flies above the winged G and ‘lets loose a / great fart and poops / gloriously just missing his / head’, but these forays into the absurd are grounded by the narrative of a solitary life, and the poem’s journey into memory. In memory, the heat between G and Sad occasionally resurfaces, but that heat remains no more than a memory.

What emerges instead is the story of a different kind of passion. G and Sad make a brief attempt to rekindle their sexual relationship, but as Sad notes when their fumbles fizzle out, there is ‘not enough / juice for the squeeze’. In Autobiography of Red, their passion brought them literally to the volcanic brink; their reunion here is not as lovers, but as a pair linked by their shared past. This shared past remains distant, however, and when Carson takes the reader back to Autobiography of Red what rings out is almost a sense of futility:

What ever
happened to your
autobiography says Sad
you were always fiddling
with it in the old days. I
gave it up says G.
Nothing was happening in
my life.

The stasis that characterises the hiatus in their relationship and the fifteen-year gap in the author’s continuation of their story define Red Doc>. Carson makes it clear that the past cannot be recovered. What we see of the passion of G and Sad is in the form of flashbacks, as when G recalls their first meeting with the words ‘HE WAS FOURTEEN / it was years ago and Sad’s / name wasn’t Sad yet. First / comet.’ While G retains the sting of their lost passion, the little insight we get into Sad’s reflection on their past relationship bears the stamp of an amused affection. Referring to a letter he wrote when he severed himself from Sad, G recalls his devastated hope that it would bring a contrite and desperate Sad in pursuit. Meanwhile, the narrator tells us the true fate of the letter: lost for two years, it is found by a friend of Sad’s who reads it aloud. Sad’s lingering attachment to G is such that he will not allow his friend to mock his former lover, but the letter stirs him no further.

Red Doc> offers a development in Carson’s work, but it is not necessarily a development that lovers of Autobiography of Red will relish. It creates a curious and at times compelling world, but one that may also exasperate the reader as its narrative veers from one scene into the next. Though the earlier work had its own literary filters – there, the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus and the arch-Modernist Gertrude Stein played the role of literary interlocutors – its tone was more consistent. Autobiography of Red gave us the arrowhead wound of a wild passion gained and lost; Red Doc> never quite captures the same sense of urgency. The closest it comes to urgency is when G reflects upon his past, a story the reader has already largely encountered, and when he is forced to confront his familial ties. While his faded relationship with Sad is a significant loss, the patina of that loss resembles the melancholy of aged, yellowing varnish. (In comparison, his relationship with his mother, who in taking him to school each day in the earlier work ‘neatened his little red wings and pushed him / In through the door’, retains its sting.) As such, Red Doc> will no doubt disappoint many who were impressed by the portrayal of love between a monster and a hero in Autobiography of Red.

It seems Carson is aware that this new work may puzzle some of her fans: she takes as her epigraph Samuel Beckett’s ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Red Doc> is no failure, but it is certainly another attempt to circle the relationship between G and Sad, to come away from a story of love’s successes and failures with a new sense of meaning. Nonetheless, Red Doc> can bring pleasure with its tendency to careen off in unexpected directions. To get the most of out this new book, the reader must have a willingness to be surprised and bemused by these shifts. The curveball turns in the narrative reflect Carson’s desire to find genuinely surprising images and metaphors in her work.

It is a pity Bruce had to return to China, where, it seems, cricket has not developed. Let us hope that it does, and that following Bruce’s example, China will produce cricketers to equal or outshine their compatriots in the Caribbean, where there were, and perhaps still are, notable Chinese cricketers, such as the outstanding Trinidadian batsman Rupert Tang Choon, who in 1946 toured what is now Guyana, with a team of Chinese players, for matches against the Guyanan Chinese. The scoreboard of Chinese cricket matches was wickedly turned into a joke by The Mighty Viking in his calypso, ‘Chinese Cricket Match’. A version of this was recorded by the pioneering audio engineer, Emory Cook, at Bretton Hall, Port of Spain, in the early 1950s, and issued on Cook Sounds of Our Times LP 1180, dance calypso! It is attributed there to The Mighty Dictator (Kenny St. Bernard). In another life I used to enjoy singing this with my friend Neil Lovett. The Mighty Viking’s text can be found in Gordon Rohlehr’s Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, p. 509.

Bruce Clunies-Ross
Jystrup, Denmark

Angelo Loukakis
via Facebook

I agree wholeheartedly with these comments about the safety of the so-called ‘international’ style, though I think its success is as much due to the economics of publishing and the marketing power of certain publishers as to cultural cringe. And I would argue that Murnane is under-recognised in Australia, at least by the wider reading public, if not by critics. The problem with so much commercial publishing is that it does so little to create markets for new kinds of writing, instead assuming conservatism in readers and making a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Anna Gibbs
via Facebook