The Boat

by Nam Le

Anchor Canada

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, January 2010

In voices as varied as the stories they inhabit, Nam Le gives us The Boat, an extraordinary debut collection of short stories which traverses the globe, moving from Japan to Colombia, New York to Iran to Iowa. 

Meeting Elise tells the story of an aging artist who fell in love with his model, and whose “terminally passive-aggressive wife” left for Russia with their infant child.  The last time he saw his daughter, she was “blanket-wrapped and pillow-sized and hot with fever on (his) apartment stoop.”  She is now a famous cellist and he becomes obsessed, driven to find her before he dies. “Family is family.You only have one shot at it.”

In his title story, The Boat, we meet Mai, Quyen, Anh Phuoc and Truong, Quyen’s young son who attaches himself to Mai.  We called them ‘the boat people’ and watched their desperation from the safety of our living rooms.  Le gives them a voice and it is not to be ignored. 

Imagination is, of course, the essence of fiction, and the ability to imagine onto the page, to pull the reader in, is what sets authors apart.  It is hard to believe Le has not been to these countries, lived the life of an aging painter, hung with teenage hit men in Colombia, or survived the wild ocean on an overcrowded boat of dubious seaworthiness.  His imagination soars and takes us with him.  There is no respite. 

Nam Le was born in Viet Nam and grew up in Australia.  His short stories have won several awards, and The Boat won The Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award  and The Melbourne Prize for Literature.  He is the editor of the Harvard Review.

The Spare Room

by Helen Garner

House of Anansi Press

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, January 2010

Helen lives a peaceful life.  Her daughter and granddaughter live next door, and life is good, until her old friend Nicola breezes into town for three weeks.  She has come to Melbourne for a round of intensive alternative treatment for advanced cancer, a treatment viewed with enormous hope by Nicola and a healthy skepticism by Helen.  And in spite of protestations to the contrary, Nicola is in great need of help.

Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian, her chauffeur.  She changes sheets, washes dishes, cooks, cleans and loses sleep. She rages at the clinic which gives her friend expensive false hope because Nicola is obviously dying.  She battles anger at Nicola’s thoughtless imposition as she begins to understand that the situation is quite beyond her. And together they share moments of great peace.  “We sat on the back step in a line, and drank our tea ... It was like being submerged to our chins in calm water.  Our limbs were weightless, and so were our hearts.  I looked at the clock.  It was only half past eight.”

When Helen cannot see how she can go on, she begins to understand why Nicola has come to her. The Spare Room moves forward with a wry antipodean humour that belies the drama swiftly unfolding within the pages.  It is an astonishing, relentless account of the resiliency of a friendship pushed to its limits.

Helen Garner writes fiction and non-fiction, essays, short stories, articles and screenplays. She won the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2006, and The Spare Room was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2009.  She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Wanting

by Richard Flanagan

Harper Collins           

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, May 2009

The central characters in Wanting are real.  Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sir John Franklin, his relentlessly ambitious wife Lady Jane Franklin, and Mathinna, an aboriginal child from Flinders Island, Tasmania. They all have one thing in common. Richard Flanagan has reached into history and woven a skillful, fictional portrayal of lives yearning for the unreachable.

Flanagan was a boy when he first saw a portrait of Mathinna wearing a red dress at the Hobart museum.  It haunted him.  Painted by convict artist Thomas Brock, the portrait has served to keep alive her memory, although details of her life are sketchy.

While Sir John Franklin is Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Mathinna catches Lady Jane’s eye.  Saving the child from ‘savagery’ becomes her mission. She adopts Mathinna, and so begins an experiment repeated countless times in Australia’s history.  “What must happen,” Lady Jane says, “is the breaking of all bonds from birth . . . children must breath in the fresh air of civilisation, not the stinking miasma of forests.”

The Franklin’s retreat from Tasmania is ignominious.  They leave Mathinna in an orphanage and return to London. When Sir John goes missing in the Arctic ice and accusations of cannibalism are flying around the city, Lady Jane solicits help from Charles Dickens.  Her social standing is teetering and she asks him to write a rebuttal, even though his “latest novel was rumoured to be “sullen socialism, its plot implausible . . . ruined by his cheap pamphleteering.” 

Flanagan has positioned his characters in their clearly defined places in history, weaving a fictional drama of their lives. His prose is spare and poetic as he moves back and forth between continents and story lines, following the lives of Dickens in London, the Franklins in Tasmania, and Mathinna. It seems effortless.  He never loses sight of his characters or the deep, sometimes desperate yearning that drives them. Lady Jane Franklin desperately wants a child, Dicken’s heart wants a love he knows is possible. Mathinna aches to belong, but when she is abandoned by the Franklins, her ruin is inevitable.

In Flanagan’s own words, Wanting is “a meditation on desire (and) the cost of its denial”.  He cautions us that his novel is a work of fiction, not a history. However, he does speak directly to the ‘catastrophe of colonialism’, a catastrophe which caused the degradation and ultimate demise of the Tasmanian aborigines.  Only a few survived.

Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania, Australia.  He is a screenwriter and author and won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish.  Wanting is his fifth novel and is shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Reviewer's note: Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep, the harrowing story of British solders in a Japanese prisoner of war camp being used as slave labour to build the Thailand/Burmese railway.

The Lieutenant

by Kate Grenville

Harper Collins

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, May 2009

Thomas Rooke was a clever lad with an aptitude for science and numbers.  His great misfortune, however, is that his parents have no money. At age 8, he is sent to the Portsmouth Naval Academy where “the cold space of the bleak dormitory sucked out his spirit and left a shell behind.”  Bullied unmercifully, he realizes he must hide his cleverness.  But luckily for Rooke, his aptitude for astronomy was noticed and “a door opened in a world that had seemed nothing but wall.”

As a young Lieutenant, he is sent to Australia, sailing with the First Fleet of convict ships to the new land. He builds an astronomy shack some distance from the naval base and sets his daily regimen of readings and sightings.  He works at night, left alone, on the whole, by the New South Wales Governor, but not by the local aborigines.  Curiosity gets the better of them, and they watch, at first from afar, then closer until his daily routine includes a cluster of women and children around a fire near his hut.  Without the bigotries of upper class England,  “Rooke was aware of witnessing something unrepeatable and irreversible.  He was watching one universe in the act of encountering another.”

Into Rooke’s isolated life comes a young aboriginal girl, Patyegarang, whose curiosity about him and his culture equals his curiosity about hers.  They exchange words, then sentences, teaching each other language.  Grenville’s portrayal of their evolving relationship is masterful, never crossing the line as their friendship solidifies through mutual understanding and trust.

Grenville’s easy writing leads us gently toward the inevitable cultural collision, building subtle tension as the playing field becomes more and more uneven. And woven throughout this fictionalized history is a moving and compassionate glimpse into the proud intelligence of the Aboriginal tribes in that moment of hesitation before good intentions are swept aside in the name of queen and country.

The Lieutenant is loosely based on the diaries of Lieutenant William Dawes, who arrived in Australia with the First Fleet.  The records he left of words and language structure  “of the indigenous people of the Sydney area is by far the most extensive we have (today).”

Kate Grenville has won international awards for her fiction.  The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize and The Secret River was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Sydney, Australia.

The Pages

by Murray Bail
Published by Harvill Secker
  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, February 2009

It has been ten years since Eucalyptus, and once again Murray Bail brings us a novel of harsh, beautiful landscapes and the dry wit that is distinctively Australian. Wesley Antill is a self appointed philosopher, and is unable to pursue his calling on the vast sheep station in New South Wales where he lives with his brother and sister. He moves to London and then Germany, pursuing what he believes should be the life of the philosopher. Germany, he writes in his journal, has given the world ‘five of the giants of western philosophy. It must be something in the water.’

After many years, he returns home and sets up an office in an abandoned wool shed where ‘lines of silver light from the loose-fitting sheets of corrugated iron and the various nail holes ... intersected the brown stillness’. But he dies before his work is produced and his siblings look for an assessment of their brother’s output. There is excitement in the Philosophy Department at Sydney University and they send Erica to try and make sense of it all. She too sets herself up in the wool shed. ‘The air was thick with the smell of wool, so thick it surrounded and began caressing her. Erica felt if she stayed here for any length of time her skin would improve.’

The Pages follows Erica’s slowly unfolding friendship with Wesley’s sister, and an almost imperceptible romance with his brother. Their quiet life in an unforgiving landscape is juxtaposed with Wesley’s diaries of his life in Europe as he struggles to find the place to write. ‘Begin with nothing. Begin again. Not to think, but allow thinking to arrive. Drought-thoughts.’ And Bail keeps us waiting right to the end, the Antill writings forever a carrot dangling on the next page, which we keep compulsively turning.

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide. He is the author of several books, including Eucalyptus, which won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.