Literature

Volkswagen Blues, Jaques Poulin

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Jaques Poulin (1937-2025) was a Canadian novelist, from Quebec, writing in French. The title of this book and his age make me think immediately of Tom Robbins (1932-2025) and Richard Brautigan (1935-1984), and indeed, that is where he seems to fit – with the beats, writers half a generation older than us, who were so fresh and new when we Boomers came to them in the late 60s.

Volkswagen Blues (1984) is Poulin’s sixth novel, coming out a long time after Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) which it references; well after Brautigan; and even some years after Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976). So there is a feeling that Poulin is referencing a movement, and a style of writing, whose time has passed.

He was awakened by the meowing of a cat
He sat up in his sleeping bag and drew aside the curtain that covered the back window of the Volkswagen minibus [I wonder why ‘minibus’ and not kombi]: he saw a tall thin girl in a white nightgown walking barefoot in the grass despite the cold; a black kitten was running behind her.
Opening lines

That’s it, that’s the cast – a VW, a man, a girl, a kitten. A little later he sees her again, hitchhiking. He picks her up (and of course the cat). The man, Jack, has just turned 40 and has decided to look for his bother Theo whom he has not seen for many years. The girl is young, tall and skinny, with long black hair. She is La Grande Sauterelle (grasshopper) for her long, thin legs. When the novel starts they are at a camping ground outside Gaspé Quebec (map).

Jack’s age and the girl’s youth – and their understated relationship – emphasise, deliberately I think, that looking-back-ness to the hippy years. All road trips reference Kerouac, but the gentleness of the writing, for me references Brautigan.

Jack has a postcard from Theo sent years earlier from Gaspé; the girl is on her way there to see a FN woman who works as a cleaner in the museum, her mother it later turns out. They discover, the girl’s mother points out, the strange text on the postcard is copied from the journal of the explorer Cartier arriving in the Bay of Gaspé in 1534. Theo’s signature in an old visitors log points them onwards to St Louis, Missouri.

The man is in a fog with little idea of how to proceed, but the girl works through the clues, turns the man’s wish to see his brother into a quest in which she is as invested as he. Their first stop is his home in Quebec City, an all day drive westwards along the St Lawrence.

I’m rereading as I write this up (or vice versa). Jack is an author. His favourite writers are: “Hemingway, Réjean Ducharme, Gabrielle Roy, Salinger, Boris Vian, Brautigan and a few others.” I wouldn’t have picked Hemingway; I should have picked Salinger; I’m glad I picked Brautigan; the others I don’t know. Jack would like to tell the girl that the title of the book she has taken from his shelves, Gabrielle Roy’s The Fragile Lights of Earth, “took on a special significance when you knew that she was a very beautiful and vulnerable woman and that her green eyes shone like lights.”

Later, and you can see it happening, “Each of his novels had been written in the following manner: he had placed two characters together in a certain setting and then he had watched them live, intervening as little as possible.”

Both have an interest in history which guides their quest, he in the French explorers, she in the interaction of the explorers with the Indians. She points out that Gaspé to St Louis – via the St Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi – is the path taken by the French in the 16 and 1700s as they moved inland and south, and that St Louis was both a major trading post and a stepping off point into the interior.

After a week in Quebec they head off, mostly west, sharing the driving – Thousand Islands, Toronto, the US border at Detroit. Her father, a truck driver, had taught her the rhythms of downshifting and upshifting to maintain power and control in the hills. But she is also the better navigator, her knees covered in maps for the route and for the surrounding country. Poulin I think knows and loves this drive, describing it village by village by landmark by campsite.

In Detroit they go find a mural by Rivera; in Chicago, a Renoir, On the Terrace, and they run into Saul Bellow; in St Louis it becomes clear they must take the Oregon Trail, the old wagon trail; at odd places finding mentions of Theo in police records, newspapers, a former lover who goes misty eyed as she remembers. In the Rockies they pick up for half a day an old traveller who thinks he’s Hemingway, and who insists they should turn south to San Francisco. There, in Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore they pick out Theo in an old photo …

I love books about writers and writing and so here is one more quote I must share

A book is never complete in itself; to understand it you must put it in relation with other books, not just books by the same author, but also books written by other people. What we think is a book most of the time is only part of another, vaster book that a number of authors have collaborated on without knowing it.

I loved this book – for its writerliness; for the gentleness of its love story; and for the writer’s acceptance that he needs reminding that the Indians were in America first.

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Jaques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues, Cormorant Books, Toronto, 1988. Trans. by Sheila Fischman. First pub. in French, 1984. 222pp.

Time of Conflict, Judah Waten

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1961 Club

I read this in time for last week’s 1961 Club, but failed to get it written up before work took me away for 9 or 10 days. Now Kaggsy wants us to start thinking about 1949, which, as it happens, is about when Time of Conflict, which is set in the Depression years, comes to an end.

Judah Waten (1911-1985) was the son of Russian-Jewish migrants who came out to Australia in 1914. He is best known for his first work, Alien Son (1952), a fictionalized account of his growing up in Perth and Melbourne. Time of Conflict (1961) is I suppose not quite Historical Fiction, but is an account of Communist activism in the Unemployed Workers Movement in NSW in the 1930s based around the quite readable story of Mick, a boy from Wagga (southern NSW) growing up via stock theft and reform school to become a boxer and activist.

Waten, himself, joined the Communist Party while still at school (around 1928), University High, Melbourne. In the early 30s he was in England and Europe, including 3 months in Wormwood Scrubs. Back in Australia he was a writer and activist. He must have been researching the Depression both for Time of Conflict and, a decade later, The Depression Years, 1929-1939, but I’m not sure to what extent if any, Time of Conflict reflects his own activities during that period. An excellent entry in the ADB says “In 1935-36 he travelled with Noel Counihan through country Victoria and New South Wales to Brisbane, living off the proceeds of Counihan’s portraits of local identities.” Which seems to be the only time he spent any time in NSW.

Waten was one of four Australian writers I can think of who remained with the Party after initial youthful enthusiasm had worn off (as it did with Kylie Tennant for instance). The others were KS Prichard, Dorothy Hewett and Frank Hardy. Of the four, Hardy probably hewed closest to Socialist Realism – the style demanded by the Party. The others, while still genuinely concerned with the working class, seem a bit freer in their style of writing.

In the 1960s and early 70s Communists began to split into streams (not that they hadn’t split earlier into Leninists and Trotskyites) – CPA (European), CPA M/L (marxist/leninist which was actually Maoist), and the SPA (Stalinist) for all the old hard-liners. Waten went with the SPA which surprises me as his politics in Time of Conflict are pretty easy-going (and in fact Waten was expelled from the Party for a while in the 30s for “petty-bourgeois irresponsibilities”).

I was an anti-War activist in those late 60s early 70s, an anarchist/syndicalist choosing to caucus with SDS (at Melb Uni), so while much of that Communist stuff was in the air, it was off to one side. From the point of view of this novel, the organisation I feel most aligned with is the Wobblies – Industrial Workers of the World whose heyday had already passed by the 1930s but whose members are mentioned from time to time as being involved in the Unemployed Workers Movement. For more on the IWW in Australia a must-read is Sydney’s Burning (1967) by Ian Turner. Sadly, my son has my copy and I might never see it again.

The novel begins in the late 1920s with Mick Anderson, then 16, walking home late at night after meeting up with his girl, Agnes. Mick “was broad shouldered, thick chested and heavily muscled and without much effort he could lift a bag of potatoes or wheat above his head” (a bag of wheat is 180lbs and most fit men – eg. young me – would struggle to carry one on their shoulders). His father steals mobs of sheep to order for a local butcher, and Mick is his increasingly unwilling offsider.

This time they get caught, Mick is put into a juvenile prison until he is 18 and Agnes’ middle class parents demand that all contact between the two cease. In prison Mick learns to box. Eventually, rather than wait for release, he escapes, makes his way to Sydney, and from there a couple of communist seamen smuggle him on board a ship going to New Zealand.

In NZ Mick is a farm worker. Time of Conflict is quite in the mainstream of Australian literature in that it is the story of a man and his mates in the bush written by a guy from the city. Waten subverts the model to some extent in that most of the men who befriend Mick are communists or activists and that generates a lot of political discussion.

Mick becomes a boxer, though his heart is not always in it, returns to Sydney, makes his way to Newcastle, using an assumed name to stop his past as a prison escapee catching up with him, and there becomes involved with the Unemployed Workers.

Although the novel goes on past the Spanish Civil War, past WWII, to round out Mick’s life; its strength is in the 1930’s and in Waten’s close knowledge of the politics of those years. One Sunday Mick goes to the (Sydney) Domain – nearly 40 years later I would listen to speakers on the Domain in Melbourne. I wonder when all that came to an end – “There was a vast crowd .. Mick moved away to the Douglas Credit platform … Then … to the humorous Charlie Reeve, one of the last surviving defendants in the wartime [WWI] IWW conspiracy case … Mick stopped to listen to all the speakers, the rebels, the wild, the peaceful, the conservative, the ribald … everywhere people talked about evictions that were continuing under labor governments … about the already low wages that had been reduced again .. Then Mr [Jack] Lang stepped onto the platform. There were shouts of triumph.”

There are other books of the Depression years, but mostly from the point of view of the suffering of the unemployed. Waten here takes us through another aspect – the men who were advocating for change, and who put their bodies on the line to prevent police from enforcing evictions. It’s not a dry or lifeless book, Mick’s personal life bubbles along throughout, and I’m glad I finally made the time to read it,

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Judah Waten, Time of Conflict, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1961. 281pp. Cover from a painting by Noel Counihan. (This first edition hardback with dustjacket was a 70th birthday present from my brother, B2)
David Carter, ‘Waten, Judah Leon (1911–1985)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University

Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa

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This is my post for last week, or instead of my post for last week, which I’ll put up later this week, belatedly, for 1961 Club. Last week from a blogging perspective was a dead loss. I got a disgusting cold off my great granddaughter over Easter then was a given a trip up north, a “triple road train to Kununurra” which turned out to be to a mine site past Warmun (or about 150 km short of Kununurra). I spent the 6,000 km round trip in a fog, driving and sleeping uncomfortably for 9 days; loading home out of Port Hedland with used conveyor belt, for a gross weight of over 100 tonnes which my old truck handled manfully, ie. with lots of whingeing.

Over the course of the trip I listened to Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton, who might have been a good, literary writer if he hadn’t been a News Ltd journalist for so long and internalised their need for constant excitement; The Most Secret Memory of Men by Senegalese/French writer Mohammed Mbougar Sarr, which was excellent, a review will follow; this one; and some short Muderbots in between, for the second or third time around because I was too rushed to organise any library books.

Mornings in Jenin 2010 tells the story of the occupation of Palestine by European and American Jews, from 1948 to the early 2000s mostly through the eyes of a Palestinian girl, Amal, born in the 1950s; though it starts with her grandfather, Yehya, a farmer in a village outside Jerusalem. Yehya’s two sons court a ‘wild’ Bedouin girl, Dalia. She marries the older, Hasan, and the other, Darweesh, who becomes a paraplegic, nevertheless marries and has a family, and lives to a great old age, providing a constant reference point as all else changes throughout the novel

Yehya’s family is forced off their land by the Nakba of 1948, ending up in a refugee camp in Jenin (about 100 km north). During the long walk, one of Dalia’s two sons, with a distinctive facial scar, is stolen by a Jewish soldier who takes him home to his wife, a Polish Holocaust survivor who gives him the name David. There is lots of room for cheap melodrama here as David inevitably reappears, but the author handles the situation well and portrays the Jewish family, and other Jewish characters, surprisingly sympathetically.

1948: Palestine was administered by Britain under a mandate from the UN which required it to provide a homeland for the Jews displaced by antisemitism – and during WWII, the Holocaust – in Europe. In 1947 the Jews rose up against the British and seized the land which, after 15 May 1948, became Israel. In this Nakba (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic), 750,000 Palestinians were “displaced”, their homes, farms, villages taken over and occupied by Israelis.

Amal and her best friend Huda, grow up in one or two room tents, and later huts, crowded together and with poor sanitation, but in the belief that they must soon return to the farms that have been in their families for generations.

1967: Six Day War. Egypt, under Nasser, and to some extent, Jordan and Syria, fight a short war with Israel which ends up with Israel victorious and the Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.

Amal’s father goes missing during the war (and never returns). Dalia, a fine midwife, trains Amal. But Dalia is mentally detoriorating. Amal is caught ‘out of bounds’ by soldiers early one morning. They appear to let her go, but she is shot in the abdomen, and nearly killed, by a sniper. When her mother dies, Amal’s brother has already gone to join the PLO, and a family conference ends up with Amal attending an academically inclined school in Jerusalem which offers scholarships and accommodation for orphans.

From there, she goes on to college in Pennsylvania, and then, in 1981, returns to rejoin her brother Youssef in Lebanon, in the Shatila refugee camp, where he is living with his childhood sweetheart, Fatima and their baby. Amar is introduced to Majid, a doctor. They marry and Amal is soon pregnant.

1982. Sabra and Shatila massacre. In June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon in order to “root out the PLO”. In August the PLO reached agreement with the IDF to leave Lebanon which they did, leaving Palestinian civilians defenceless. As soon as they were gone, the IDF secured the Sabra locality, including the Shatila refugee camp, allowing in only Lebanese Christian militia who undertook the systematic killing of “1500-3500” Lebanese and Palestinian Muslims.

This is an almost unbearable book. To be a Palestinian, as their genocide by the Israelis just goes on and on, is unimaginable. I won’t continue telling the story of Amal and her family and her friends. But Abulhawa does. Often in the first person, but also in the third, both to tell other stories and to view Amal from the ‘outside’.

David, who we have glimpsed off and on as an Israeli soldier, becomes more prominent towards the end as he searches out his Palestinian roots. The big question we are left with is: Is Yousef the driver of the truck bomb which destroys the US embassy in Beruit in 1983? I hope so.

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Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin, first pub 2006 (as ‘Scar of David’). Revised and republished under current title, Bloomsbury, 2010. Audible version read by Suzanne Toren. 12 hours

The Beauties and the Furies, Christina Stead

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This is the cover of the edition I read. The only other cover I could bring up with a search was Virago’s. I wonder what the original covers were – Peter Davies, London and D Appleton Century in the US – in 1936.

Ok, I found the original American cover. Boring (but it was the Depression). On with the review …

The Beauties and the Furies (1936) was Stead’s third published work. It is beautifully written; shows Stead fully immersed in the Modernism of James Joyce and DH Lawrence; but as with her previous two, still lacks fully realised central characters.

My developing hypothesis is that until her fifth and sixth, The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1945), which are largely autobiographical, Stead was focussing on speech – what her characters say, rather than what they think – but not achieving the insight that Joyce and Woolf were conveying with ‘stream of consciousness‘. However, in those two, she knows the characters so intimately, and she herself as Louie and Teresa is so central, that she finally gives her fiction the psychological depth she was always aiming for, and which reaches perfection in her following novel, Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) .

The first novel she wrote, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), is based on times and locations she knew well. It jumps around between main characters who are based on herself and people she knew without any one of them being preeminent. When she finally found a publisher willing to take her on in 1930 or 31, Peter Davies, he wanted something more conventional to bring out first, to introduce her to readers, and she promised him, and began, another novel. But when that ran into a block, she came up with the technically excellent and equally unconventional The Salzburg Tales (1934), tying together short stories she had been working on for a while with some new ones, and in a startlingly confident take on The Canterbury Tales, framing them as being told by travellers in Salzburg which she had recently visited. Davies, a bit reluctantly, released them both in 1934, in conjunction with Appleton in the US, to some critical acclaim.

Stead and her partner, later husband (when he finally got his divorce), William Blake, had moved from London where they had met, to Paris in 1930 where he was an executive in a small merchant bank, and where they were able to move on the edges of Paris’s Modernist arts community.

It was [Samuel] Putnam who introduced Stead to Louis Guilloux, whose proletarian novel, Le Sang Noir influenced her early writing. A page of notes survives, in which Stead forms comparisons between Guilloux and Joyce: both write cinematic scenes; both see their role as active, explanatory and sometimes philosophical (as opposed to Flaubert, who believed the writer should be entirely off-stage); both use two characters as mirror or shadow selves – all techniques Stead was to try out in her early writing.
Hazel Rowley, 1993, p.110

The Beauties and the Furies (1936), her next work, reflects this time living in Paris. But she’s not in it and I think because of that it struggles to develop any force. She fails to make you care about the characters.

“I’m a fool.” [Oliver] said to himself pleasantly. “Coromandel’s unattached, and she likes me: she’d make a good wife. Poor Elvira! I won’t read her my essay tonight, at any rate: I’ll have that much self-control.
“When he got home Blanche had just put Elvira to bed. Oliver could not resist saying to Elvira: “You are always lovelier at night than in the daytime: Your great underbrush eyes – when I make money I’m going to buy coloured sheets and pillow-slips for you to lie on, black, cream, damask.
“Blanche watched them eagerly, and then left, saying: “Now, look after her; amuse her!”
“Oh, I will.”
He read her the scene in the lying-in hospital in James Joyce’s Ulysses, then some of his poems ..

The story, briefly, is that, Elvira, 30-ish and childless, leaves her husband, Paul, a reasonably well off doctor in London to join Oliver, a not well-off doctoral student in his twenties, in Paris, where they live in various hotels and rooms. On the train over, Elvira meets Marpurgo, who works with a firm buying and selling fine hand-made lace. Marpurgo attaches himself to the couple as an older friend and advisor. Elvira meets a ‘dancer’, Blanche, in a bar. When Elvira finds she is pregnant (to Oliver) it is Blanche who finds a solution, though Elvira shilly-shallies about taking her up on it. Eventually Paul, accompanied by Elvira’s brother, comes over to take her back. They all meet in various combinations over and over as Elvira struggles to come to any decision.

We learn a lot about Marpurgo, his absent wife, his relationship with the two brothers who employ him, and through him see a lot of Paris. Paul gets his country cousin, Sara, who has always had a crush on him, to join him in Paris. Through Oliver, who is at least notionally a Marxist, we are engaged in the workers struggle of that time. Oliver meets a young woman, Coromandel, who Marpurgo also knows indirectly. Oliver falls into an affair with Coromandel while Elvira is laid up in bed.

The problem for Stead is that she spreads herself a bit thin over all these people, and, more importantly, we never get to care about any of them. Coromandel is easily the most attractive (personality) and the one who understands herself best, but she is in the story for a while and then she is gone.

So, great writing, and an important step along the way for a developing writer. But not one of my favourites.

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Christina Stead, The Beauties and the Furies, first pub. 1936. My edition, with Introduction by Margaret Harris, Text Classics, 2016. 347pp
Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead: A Biography, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1993

Ogadinma, Ukamaka Olisakwe

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Ogadinma:: or Everything Will Be All Right (2020) begins in the 1980s, when the army takes over the government of Nigeria. Ogadinma, the eponymous heroine is at the time 17 and she remains just 17, 18, 19 throughout the novel, through rapes, marriage, childbirth and divorce.

The author Ukamaka Olisakwe was born in 1982 of Igbo (Christian, Eastern Nigeria) parents living in the mostly Muslim north. Ogadinma’s situation is similar but her mother has left and her father has brought her up alone. They go back to their home village in the Eastern Region each year for Christmas and that way stay in touch with extended family.

A very brief timeline of Nigerian post-colonial history:
1960. Independence from Britain, democratic government.
1963. Becomes a republic
1966. Military coup. Igbo seen as having too much influence. Massacres of Igbo living in the (Hausa/Muslim) north
1967. Eastern Region (Biafra), home of the Igbo, secedes. Biafra and Nigeria at war
1970. Biafra loses war, is reincorporated into Nigeria
1970s. Unstable civilian governments
1983 Military takes over government promising elections at some future date
1993 Presidential elections held. The winner, Abiola, is jailed until he dies.
and so, on we go with authoritarian governments backed by the military.
I’d just like to mention Pres. Umaru Yar’Adua, too ill to govern effectively, who in 2009 travels to Saudi Arabia for heart surgery which was the situation in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. He dies soon after and is succeeded by his deputy, Goodluck Jonathon.

I found it interesting that the novel depicts no racial (inter-tribal) tension, neither in the north, nor for the bulk of the novel when Ogadinma is living in the capital, Lagos (which is in Yoruba country). Maybe there was none. The military are mentioned in passing, mostly when Ogadinma sees soldiers beating people up in the street, but also when her husband is jailed for spurious financial crimes committed against the previous government. It is never clear whether this is just straight out extortion or maybe also racial.

Ogadinma’s passivity in the face of older men constantly leads her into trouble, for which she then wears the blame. It is very well written (and read) and Milly and I who listened together while travelling down south last week, both enjoyed it were gripped by the evolution of Ogadinma’s situation.

Ukamaka Olisakwe, Ogadinma: or, Everything Will Be All Right, 2020. Audiobook read by Adjoa Andoh. 9 hours.

Idu (1970) was the second novel – after Efuru – of pioneer Nigerian writer Flora Nwapa. I won’t/can’t say much about it as I read it some time ago but I wanted to include it here in this review of books by/about African women I’ve read in the last few months. Like Efuru, it is a story of village life (in the Niger delta probably, where Nwapa grew up) and of one woman’s struggles in an otherwise happy marriage where she is unable to get pregnant.

I absolutely love Nwapa’s language and the way she renders traditional (presumably Igbo) speech into English.

“Our Uzoechi did you come to the stream?” “Yes, our Nwasobi, I came to the stream. Are you well?” … “Look, there’s Idu. Idu, our Idu, are you well?” “I am very well,” replied Idu, “I have come to fetch some water. My husband is not very well today.”… “Let not our Adiewere be ill. God forbid that our Adiewere be ill, ” Uzoechi said ..

from page 1, and on it goes, slowly, gently building our picture of Idu, her family, her friends and fellow villagers.

Flora Nwapa, Idu, Heinemann African Writers Series, 1970. 218pp.

We move to Tanzania, on the other coast and south of the Equator where Nigeria is north. Rosa Mistika (1971) is said to be the first-ever Swahili novel to address issues of domestic violence, sexual coercion, and abortion. It was translated into English, by JB Rubin, last year, which is how I came to hear about it. The author Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944-2020) is a guy, and his protagonist, Rosa, is a promiscuous woman – which is too often the case, in my opinion.

I wrote about the history of Tanzania in my review of After Lives by Abdulrazak Gurnah, but basically colonial ‘administration’ of Tanzania ended in 1961, so this novel is set in the first years of independence.

Rosa grows up in a rural village on an island in Lake Victoria, as did the author. The story is how she breaks away from poverty, from a drunken, violent father – with the support of her mother, Regina, who is the first character we meet – to get the schooling she needs. She’s accepted into a Catholic girls school, boys write her letters, but she concentrates on her schoolwork. Until Year 12, when it all starts to go awry.

One of the criticisms of this book, which led to it being banned, is that the author presents Rosa’s immorality without comment or judgement. My own opinion is that the calamitous ending is evidence enough that the author intended a moral. I didn’t find Rosa a particularly engaging character, but as always, it’s interesting ‘living’ for a few hours or days in another world.

Euphrase Kezilahabi, Rosa Mistika, 1971 and 1981, trans JB Rubin 2025. 157pp
Interview with Rubin in Chicago Review of Books

Sukoluhle “Sue” Nyathi (1978- ) is a Ndebele (which the British called Matebele) woman from Zimbabwe, currently working in South Africa. The Golddiggers (2018), her second novel, begins with a car in Bulawayo which is to transport a group of Zimbabweans illegally across the border to South Africa where they might find work (or in the case of a young child, their mother).

Poverty is widespread in Zimbabwe – at one stage inflation reached “89.7 sextillion percent” – and there are large numbers of Zimbabweans in South Africa as illegal migrants doing menial jobs.

We are introduced to the travellers one or two at a time, and are told first their backstories, then the adventure of the trip across the border, the Limpopo, then their, separate, experiences in South Africa. I imagine the experiences are authentic, though Nyathi herself is a financial analyst, but the telling is clumsy – in that way of people who do well at English in school and are told they should write a book, a task for which they demonstrably have no natural ability.

Sue Nyathi, The Golddiggers, 2020. Audiobook read by Malika Ndlovu. 8 hours

Plains of Promise, Alexis Wright

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Alexis Wright (1950 – ) a Waanyi* woman, is Australia’s greatest living writer. Like many readers it seems, I came to her work via her second novel, Carpentaria (2006) which took two years to find a publisher (Giramondo) before going on to win the Miles Franklin. The implication being that this novel, her first, Plains of Promise (1997) didn’t receive much attention. Luckily for us, Wright’s rise to prominence led to it being republished in 2022 (There is a long list of reprints prior to 2022, so perhaps the truth is I just failed to notice).

Mykela Saunders in her Introduction points out that 1997 was the year of Bringing Them Home, ‘The Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’; the year we ‘discovered the Stolen Generations – the taking, over the previous century, of maybe a third of all Aboriginal children from their parents; the year Prime Minister John Howard made it clear he would not be apologising, the first recommendation of the Report, nor would he ever implement any of the others.

Saunders makes the interesting point that over the course of her fiction Wright deals with the Stolen Generations (Plains of Promise); with land rights and mining on Aboriginal land (Carpentaria); and with the Federal Government’s ‘Intervention‘ in Aboriginal communities (The Swan Book and Praiseworthy), echoing the change in focus of Aboriginal activism over the course of her adult life.

Plains of Promise begins with St Dominic’s Mission for Aborigines; a dormitory for “three generations of black girls laughing in their innocence”; a crow, a harbinger of death, in a tree; a (presumably Waanyi) community. The girls dormitory sounds like a shearing shed: “The corrugated iron windows, held out with long sticks, always stayed open before the Wet.” Later, the community’s housing is described as rows of “corrugated iron, one-room huts that looked like slight enlargements of outdoor dunnies”, plus communal sheds and shanties for the less ‘privileged’, with one water tap for every 200 people.

A woman originally from another people further south kills herself.

Errol Jipp, the missionary in charge of St Dominic’s, with full powers for the protection of its eight hundred or so Aboriginal inmates under state laws … stood directly in front of Ivy ‘Koopundi’ Andrews, aged about seven. She had just acquired the name Andrews .. “Your mother died this morning, Ivy,” Jipp announced, looking around the dormitory.

We learn more from the chatter of nameless others. That the dead woman had taken a shack down by the creek, was distraught when her daughter, her only company, was removed, had borrowed some kerosene and set herself on fire. Then we get a little of her back story. How she grew up in the homestead of a remote sheep station, separated from her own people to be a companion to white children; had lived for a while with a shearer, got pregnant, found herself unwanted by the whites, unwanted by her own people and sent away to the mission by a magistrate.

We’re in the 1950s, Ivy’s timeline roughly matching Wright’s own. One of my great grandfathers, 60 or 70 years earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century, was a magistrate and gold warden further east, at Charters Towers. Gold history always predominates, but I wonder now how many Aboriginal ‘problems’ he had to deal with in the course of his work. Not that most of them were not dealt with by shooting (eg. the extinction of the Waanyi’s neighbours, the Injilarija)

Jipp begins taking Ivy out of the dormitory at night, to the vestry or to the banana plantation/cemetery, and raping her. Ivy is ostracised, blamed. A rash of suicides by fire breaks out. The Mission of course covers it up, but the elders have their own laws and, eventually, send a young man, Elliot, to go down to Ivy’s mother’s country to determine the source of the evil she has brought on them.

Some years pass. People in the community continue to die. Elliot makes a second quest into Ivy’s country, getting caught up in the flooding of Channel Country (when it rains in north and central Queensland the usually dry rivers drain inland towards Lake Eyre in northern South Australia, a great salt lake which is below sea level. As it happens, this is occurring right now (Feb, Mar 2026)).

At age 14, marriage and a child, Mary, come to Ivy. Life goes on, not happily. Ivy moves into a country town, on the fringes as always. Mary gets an education, begins working with an Aboriginal Rights organisation, ends up back at St Dominic’s.

This is not quite a saga, though there is a huge range of often colourful supplementary characters, but rather, I think, Wright’s fictionalisation of what it was to be Aboriginal over the four or five decades of her life to 1997 and of the changes that occurred over that time.

It is astonishing that such a great writer took so long, if not to begin writing, I can’t imagine she didn’t always write, then to make her work public. In Plains of Promise you can see her gathering her material – the colonisation of her people; marshalling her rage; and beginning on the dream-like quests which are a feature of her later work.

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Alexis Wright, Plains of Promise, UQP, Brisbane, 1997. 384pp

* Waanyi country( in centre of map). A largish area in north Queensland, south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Cloncurry where Wright grew up and Mt Isa. (extract from map of Pama–Nyungan languages)

Alexis Wright, works:
Grog War (19977) NF. I own a copy. I’ll read it soon
Plains of Promise (1997) BIP review
Carpentaria (2006) my review
The Swan Book (2013) my review
Tracker (2017) NF my review
Praiseworthy (2023) my review 1/2, my review 2/2

Andrew Blackman attended Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Alexis Wright in conversation at Southbank Centre (London, UK, I guess) in 2008. (Here)

King Arthur

wadholloway English, Literature , , ,

The Novel pre-Jane Austen

Tapestry c.1385 (‘Nine Heroes’)

Over the last few weeks looking into the earliest days not so much of the novel as of the earliest written accounts of story-telling in Britain. I ran into a Welsh connection for Karen/Booker Talk’s Reading Wales Month 2026 which ties in, astoundingly, to my earlier post on Virgil’s Aeneid.

The Welsh connection begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth (1095-1155), a Welsh priest who was probably a member of the French speaking aristocracy, and his Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain) which is a fictitious history of Britain, covering two millenia, from Brutus of Troy to the Saxons of eastern Britain in the 7th century AD.

The connection to the Aeneid is that Brutus of Troy, “first king of Britain”, was Aeneas’ great grandson.

The connection to my heading, ‘King Arthur’, is that Monmouth’s Historia contains also the story of King Arthur, derived from earlier accounts, in particular Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons), stories collected by and sometimes attributed to, the 9th century Welsh monk, Nennius, who added a Prologue. As it happens, Monmouth in South Wales is near Caerleon, the supposed site of Camelot, King Arthur’s court.

My actual entry point into this whole area was a suggestion by Marcie/BIP that we read The Mabinogion, eleven Welsh folk stories committed to writing in Welsh, by one or more authors around 1100 AD, with the first complete English translation being by Charlotte Guest in 1845.

Book I, Monmouth’s History

I was able to locate online only excerpts from Monmouth (see Pressbooks), but here is a brief precis of Brutus’s story:

Aeneas, having escaped from Troy to the west coast of Italy, defeated Turnus, married Lavinia daughter of king Latinus and became ruler. He was succeeded by his son Ascinius who “built Alba upon the Tiber, and begat a son named Sylvius”. Sylvius in turn lay with a niece of Lavinia who bore him a son, Brutus, and died.

At age 15 Brutus killed his father in a hunting accident and was expelled from Italy. He wandered around Europe, collecting followers from the Trojan diaspora, ending up in ‘Albion’, an island “inhabited by none but a few giants”. There Brutus and his followers settled. “At last Brutus called the island after his own name Britain, and his companions Britons.”

The Mabinogion

Guest points out in her Introduction to The Mabinogion, and indeed she was the one who gave it that name, that the stories she had collected were common all across Europe as “a body of ‘Romance’, which in various forms retained its popularity till the Reformation. In it the plot, the incidents, the characters, were almost wholly those of Chivalry, that bond which united the warriors of France, Spain, and Italy, with those of pure Teutonic descent, and embraced more or less firmly all the nations of Europe, excepting only the Slavonic races, not yet risen to power, and the Celts, who had fallen from it.”

Yet, despite the “fierce, and not causeless, hatred” of the Celts for the others “it is remarkable that when the chief romances are examined, the name of many of the heroes and their scenes of action are found to be Celtic … of persons and places famous in the traditions of Wales and Brittany [such as] Ywaine and Gawaine, Sir Perceval de Galles, Eric and Enide, Mort d’Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Sir Tristan, the Graal, &c.”

Kilhwch and Olwen [in the Mabinogion]

In this story Kilhwch is told by his stepmother to seek out Olwen,”the daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr” to be his wife. His father, a chieftan, advises him to seek assistance from his cousin Arthur.”Sovereign Ruler of this Island”. Kilhwch journeys to Arthur’s court, where Arthur first, unsuccessfully sends out messengers to find Olwen, and then gives Kilhwch his best men to go an a quest with him: Kai, who could last nine days and nine nights underwater; Bedwyr, who always went with Kai, and whose sword did more damage than the swords of any three other men; Kynddelig the Guide; Gwrhyr Gwalstawt Ieithoedd, because he knew all tongues; Gwalchmai the son of Gwyar, who never failed in a quest; and Menw the son of Teirgwaedd who could cast spells.

Their journey takes them to a fine castle, the home of Yspaddaden Penkaw. His daughter comes out to the waiting men

The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three-mewed falcon was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses. Whoso beheld her was filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprung up wherever she trod. And therefore was she called Olwen.

And Kilhwch said unto her, “Ah! maiden, thou art she whom I have loved; come away with me

Of course he must first ask her father. Three times they go in to Yspaddaden Penkaw, three times does he attempt to harm them, and each time it is he who is harmed. On the fourth time he sets Kilhwch a series of tasks – to level a hill, to plough and seed the land, and on and on, to Get the sword of Gwrnach the Giant; and each time Kilhwch responds, “It will be easy for me to compass this.”

Kilhwch’s band journey to the castle of Gwrnach the Giant where Kai tricks him into giving up his sword, and with it removes his head. They sack the castle and return to Arthur’s court where Arthur immediately commits to undertaking the tasks. “Then Arthur rose up, and the warriors of the Islands of Britain with him.”

The tasks are accomplished. Yspaddaden Penkaw gives up his daughter and his life.

“And that night Olwen became Kilhwch’s bride, and she continued to be his wife as long as she lived. And the hosts of Arthur dispersed themselves, each man to his own country.”

I am not sure how many of the stories in The Mabinogion involve the legends of Arthur’s court, but glancing through it, at least a number of them do. Monmouth is said to be the source for written accounts of the Arthurian legends, in Britain at least – though I’m not sure when his work made it from Latin to English. Both Monmouth’s History and The Mabinogion clearly rely on the same early Welsh (Celtic) sources, first collected two centuries earlier by Nennius.

These works mark the beginnings of the Chivalric stream in English literature, which stream persisted throughout Europe for half a millenium, mostly in French, I think, in England at least, until at last descending into the satire that is Don Quixote.

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Charlotte Guest translator and editor, The Mabinogion, complete collection first pub.1845. Available Project Gutenberg.
Geofrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), original title De gestis Britonum (On the Deeds of the Britons), first pub. 1136

My list of early works in Latin and the Chivalric stream continues to grow. It now looks like this:

Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) c.540 AD
Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (An Ecclesiastical History of the English People) 731 AD
Unknown, Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) Latin, C9th. Prologue added by Welsh monk, Nennius
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum (Chronicle of the Kings of England) 1125
Arthurian legends:
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), originally De gestis Britonum (On the Deeds of the Britons), Latin 1136.
Unknown, The Mabinogion (Welsh, c.1100) trans. Charlotte Guest 1845
Jean Bodel, Chanson des Saisnes (“Song of the Saxons”), French, C12th – referring to The Matter of Britain (King Arthur), The Matter of France (Charlemagne), The Matter of Rome, cycles of verse and prose myths
Marie de France (court of Henry II) c. 1200
‘Pearl Poet’, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English) c.1375 [also Cleanness, Pearl, Patience]
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (trans from French, Caxton, 1485)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 1590
Philip Sidney, Mary Herbert née Sidney, Mary Wroth, Arcadia, Urania c. 1600
reference: Mothers of the Novel, Dale Spender (my review)

Anna, Angus Gaunt

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

ReadIndies Month

Anna by Angus Gaunt was the co-winner of the 2025 “20/40” Prize – for works between 20,000 and 40,000 words – from Finlay Lloyd publishing. I don’t know how many words it is, but it’s 110pp. The other co-winner was Kim Kelly with Touched.

WG sent me Anna last year to get my opinion (I’m sorry, I’ve misplaced the card she sent with it) and I’ve saved it up to participate in Kaggsy’s ReadIndies Month. Finlay Lloyd, based in Braidwood, NSW, are definitely ‘indies’ “without the commercial imperative of most publishers,” well, half their luck! “we are able to champion ideas and authors for their intrinsic interest and quality.”

The author’s bio says “Angus Gaunt was born and educated in England and came to Australia in 1987.” I put that in because for all that Gaunt has been here for the best part of 4 decades, this is a totally European story.

Anna, a young woman, is a detainee – I’ve just read a near future dystopia, set in the US, where women are held on suspicion that they might commit crimes and so are ‘retainees’, theoretically still holding rights that detainees don’t (The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami). We have all sorts of weasel words for holding people we don’t like in concentration camps – in a camp in an endless forest of mostly birch and aspen (I’ve been reading the words ‘birch’ and ‘aspen’ all my life without knowing, or even wondering particularly what they are. Well, trees obviously, confined to the northern hemisphere, and I think to colder climates, and apparently aspen mostly coexist with conifers).

The story is an old one. There has been a war. Families on the losing side are displaced, herded into remote camps where they are poorly fed and made to work. Anna, having the care of her own younger siblings, has been given the care of others as well. On this day, it seems the war is over, the gates are open, Anna ventures out into the surrounding forest, bumps into a guard, a boy her own age

She was not used to the back and forth he seemed to want. He knew little of Anna’s language, beyond greetings and thanks, but she had picked up enough of his to grasp most of his words. It was odd hearing the language used like this. Her experience of it had mostly been words that could be barked – commands and threats and insults.”

Anna wanders off into the bush. By the time she gets back to the camp it is deserted. Trucks have come for the guards and the detainees have followed them on foot to the railhead, some days walk away. Anna sets out to follow them, encounters the boy guard who with a lucky shot with one of his last bullets has killed a hare. They share it and she warily allows him to accompany her.

When they finally reach the rail head, the last train has been and gone. An old couple living in one of the few remaining cottages of a derelict railway village takes them in. Temporarily. Anna will press on.

It is hard to say what this story is , or even why it was written. Certainly it maintains our interest – will Anna ever make her way out of the forest? Is the boy guard anything other than a necessary, though barely trusted, ally in a difficult situation?

But what does it say about the many, many Anna’s of this world making their way on foot from impossible situations to slightly less impossible situations? Not a lot, certainly nothing about the causes of their situation. Nor is it a particularly deep character study. And – I’m sure Sue is waiting for this – what does a sixtyish man, safe in middle-Australia, bring to our understanding of a not yet adult girl, coping with isolation and starvation, a long way from home, a home that probably no longer exists? Not much.

I mentioned above The Dream Hotel in which Lalami explores undeserved internment, effectively a critique of the mindset that produced ICE; in The Left Hand of Darkness the great Ursula le Guin uses two people on a long, difficult trek to explore all sorts of things, but especially our understanding of gender; and if you want a male author envisaging how a young Australian woman might deal with war, you have John Marsden’s Tomorrow series.

Anna is none of these. WG, in her review, sees the story as succeeding as a character study. She writes, “Anna is beautiful to read, from the first sentence. The language is tight but expressive. The necessary tension is off-set by moments of tenderness and hope ..”.

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Angus Gaunt, Anna, Finlay Lloyd, Sydney, 2025. 110pp

Finlay Lloyd are proud that their books are printed in Australia. Anna was printed by IVE Print Victoria. Not a name I recognised, but a search turned up that IVE’s printing operations in Melbourne were the former Franklin Web where I worked for many years off and on developing software (when I went out on my own around 1987 my intention was to write software for the transport industry, but Franklin Web kept giving me so much work that I ended up an expert on printing operations).

Two more Canadian women in the Bush

wadholloway Literature , , , ,
A typical Canadian Bush scene, but where’s the snow?

It has surprised me that Canadians seem to use ‘the Bush’ as we do, as that great outdoors where man struggles against hostile nature, where women, to the extent that they are allowed in, must stand by their man.

Of course – I hope you see it as ‘of course’ – I have spent a great deal of my blog documenting how Australian women writers developed a counter myth, the myth of the Independent Woman equally at home in the Bush as the men. From a theory point of view, this seemed to me to be an Australian take on the New Woman movement and first wave feminism, combined with a genuine love of Bush living.

Marcie/Buried in Print keeps introducing me to new (to me) Canadian women and Indigenous authors and I hope I am making my way towards an overview. So, Nellie McClung might be Canada’s Miles Franklin; Susanna Moodie, the hard done by wife in a Barbara Baynton story (a comparison Moodie would hate); but it is harder to name a Canadian Catherine Helen Spence or Eve Langley.

The two women I consider here, Sheila Watson and Aritha van Herk, the former is a contemporary of Langley, and similarly ‘poetic’; van Herk we could compare maybe with Nikki Gemmell and Shiver.

Sheila Watson, The Double Hook (1959)

Sheila Watson (1909-1998) was raised, educated and taught for some years in British Columbia. Two years spent teaching at relatively remote Dog Creek BC gave her the idea for The Double Hook, her first published novel, which came out in 1959 while she was doing a PhD under Marshall McLuhan at University of Toronto, although it had been written some years earlier and struggled to find a publisher.

Yet when it came out, it was to immediate acclaim. My guess is that it was recognised as the first literary work to engage with the Canadian backwoods, the first intersection of Modernism and the Bush. The novel (novella) begins:

In the folds of the hills
under Coyote’s eye
lived
the old lady, mother of William
of James and Greta

James and Greta live with the ‘old lady’ in the family home, one of a number of farming properties spread along a creek. By the end of the first page, the old lady is dead, pushed down by James. “You’ll not fish today”, he says. Yet for the remaining 130 odd pages, the old lady is seen on farms up and down the valley, fishing as she had for years, irrespective of property rights.

James and Greta must, separately, work out how they can bring the death of their mother to a conclusion that is not ‘James killed his mother’, and to do that in the midst of the ordinary dramas of the other households along the valley: William and his wife Ara who live in their own house nearby; Felix whose wife and children have gone off with another man; the Widow whose young daughter, James’ lover, is missing; and so on.

Episodes in the lives of these people flicker in and out, until resolved by a fire, a death, a birth; while in the background, there is Coyote, a nod, the only nod, to the valley’s original inhabitants.

Aritha van Herk, The Tent Peg (1981)

Aritha van Herk (1954- ) grew up in Alberta, where it appears, she still lives, though the setting for The Tent Peg, her second novel, is the Yukon, the Canadian territory adjacent to Alaska. Van Herk’s marital status shouldn’t matter, but as it happens her husband is an exploration geologist.

The story is that an androgynously shaped young woman, JL, is taken on as cook for a crew of nine geologists, all guys, who will be camping out for the three relatively snow-free months of summer in the mountains where the corporation they work for believes they might find uranium. The narration is carried forward, a few pages at a time, by whoever has something to say. Mackenzie, the team leader, who’s getting too old for field work, initially believes JL is a boy:

The toilet flushes and he [JL] comes out of the cubicle and stands beside me and stares at my cock singing piss against the enamel … I’m beginning to think that his problem is he’s queer, when he says flat out and still staring at my member, “Mackenzie, I’m a girl.”

Mackenzie takes her on anyway. JL is a Sociology student, but also an experienced camp cook, so that’s not a problem; and the rest of the novel is about how she is able to assert her independence in the face of the men who assume they can fuck her, and interestingly, of the men who would treat her as mother confessor. And of course there’s the scenery – flying in to a lake in a valley in the little seaplane which keeps them in supplies; swooping up and down the mountains in the helicopter which carries the men to site; hiking in the forest. Having read about van Herk’s geologist husband only as I was writing this up, I imagine he has taken her up there at least once.

All the men think about, quite a number of them obsess about, JL’s body. The summer ends with JL owning her woman’s body, saying as Eve Langley says, yes, look, I’m a woman, not a man, but there is a place for me here too, an equal place, not a subsidiary place.

February is ReadIndies month.

I have an ‘Indies’ post in mind for next week, but thought to check out the publisher of both these works, McClelland & Stewart, and discovered that, while now subsumed into PenguinRandomHouse, they were over most of the previous century an important, independent outlet for Canadian work (Wiki), publishing Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery in 1910; and later, writers including Leonard Cohen, Margaret Lawrence and Michael Ondaatje, to list just the ones whose names I recognise.

Their New Canadian Library imprint, under which both these books were published, was a line of ‘quality’ paperbacks intended for the college and university market. I think of ‘Indie’ publishers as doing small print runs of works too far off mainstream for the big guys to want to handle. M&S, as with Angus & Robertson in Australia, were big in their home markets. The most ‘indie’ thing you can say about them, and it’s not nothing, is that they weren’t owned by the oligarchs in London and New York.

Luckily I checked Kaggsy’s page before posting and I see that with M&S now a subsidiary of PRH these books are no longer eligible for listing.

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Sheila Watson, The Double Hook, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1959. 134pp
Aritha van Herk, The Tent Peg, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1981. 228pp

Christine Brooke-Rose

wadholloway English, Literature , ,

I forget now exactly how it happened, but a few months ago Marcie (Buried in Print) and I came across mention of an experimental, post-modern writer of whom I at least had never previously heard. Chasing information about her, I found another blogger describing her as “criminally neglected” (here), going on: “Her work is enlightening and entertaining, posing some extremely interesting questions regarding the British approach to the development of literary theory in the twentieth century.”

Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012) was English, born in Switzerland, grew up in Belgium, served in the WAAF at Bletchley Park during WWII, before completing a BA and an MA at Oxford and a PhD at University College London. She went on to work as a literary academic and author, both in England and overseas.

“But don’t you think, Miss Grampion,” said the professor beyond the long, wide table, “that palatal dipthongisation in fourteenth century Kentish may have been optional?” Opening paragraph of The Languages of Love, Brooke-Rose’s first novel.

Marcie and I were intrigued enough to read a novel each by Brooke-Rose to see for ourselves. The one I manged to get hold of was Thru (1975) which is one of four – Out, Such, Between, Thru – which can be read together; and was number 8 of her 16 novels (Wiki Bibliography).

Thru goes on like this for 165 pages. I found each page interesting to read, but very little connection between one page and the next. Sometimes a character, Larissa in particular, would come up for a while. And often the subject, to the extent I could make sense of it, was language itself, with lots of tortured puns.

Brooke-Rose would I’m sure have been a very interesting lecturer, extremely knowledgeable about the beginnings of the English novel – which after all is my project for the next year or two – if only I could follow what she is saying:

Take Homer for instance through to the civilization of the sign with its dualistic binary structure and its vertical hierarchy which coincides roughly though not by chance with the Renaissance … Thru p.33

Interestingly, Goodreads contains no synopsis of Thru but one reviewer (MJ Nicholls) says “The final novel of the quartet is her most typographically ambitious work, bearing all manner of acrostic and spirally puzzles, many inscrutable to those not immersed up to their eyeballs in literary theory ..” which I think pretty well sums it up.

We might have left it there but I came across this: “After publishing four well-reviewed, conventional novels, Brooke-Rose survived a difficult illness and moved to France, where she began writing experimental fiction.” (Poetry Foundation). And so I ordered her first, The Languages of Love (1957) to see what she was like before her works turned into concrete poetry.

The novel commences – as per the quote with which I began this post – with Julia Grampion being examined on her PhD thesis. After the ordeal is over, one of the examiners, Dr Reeves takes her for drinks, on his Lambretta. He’s married but he soon makes it clear he wants to get in Julia’s pants. After Thru, The Languages of Love is an ordinary campus autofiction, just the sort of novel I favour.

Another of the examiners offers Julia a lecturer’s position in a regional university. Reeves scores a book deal on medieval adultery or somesuch. He holds out to Julia the opportunity to contribute.

Julia is engaged to Paul who is working on East African languages with Hussein. Paul is Catholic. Julia married and divorced (in the Church of England) as a teenager during the War, is willing to convert, but the Catholic Church will not allow Paul to marry a divorcee. All very reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s tortuous Catholicism around the same time. Hussein is the lover of Georgina who has a Japanese fetish.

Julia agrees she and Paul have no future. Goes home to cry. Reeves comes round and does the older man you just cry on my shoulder thing. He’s persistent. They all mill around each other for weeks.

Bernard [Reeves] changed his tactics. “Darling, I was only teasing.” You look so stunning in that dress, I can’t bear anyone else even talking to you.” She said nothing. She liked him to be jealous, but she had always been annoyed by the premature and proprietary way he called her ‘darling’, almost from the first. She reserved the word for intimacy, which she had no intention of allowing.

Which she thought she had no intention of allowing. Soon they get to the old: ‘She lay half undressed on the bed, comforting him. He was sobbing without tears … “I was frightened … that you would find me middle aged and inadequate, and I am.”’

Of course, Paul chooses that moment to knock on the door ..

Things go on from there. There’s drama with Hussein, returning to Africa, not returning. A declaration of love involving a camel. There’s drama with Bernard’s wife. It’s all very surfacey. And say what you like about Sally Rooney, she gets deep inside her protagonists.

The novel ends with Julia having learnt things about herself; and as it begins, with “the problem of dipthongisation in fourteenth century Kentish.”

Julia’s first conversation with Reeves is about whether she might have to become an ordinary novelist. The Languages of Love is an enjoyable enough read, but in the end it is just another ‘ordinary’ campus novel. I don’t think though that Brooke-Rose was happy to be ordinary, hence Out, Such, Between, Thru.

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Christine Brooke-Rose, The Languages of Love, first pub. 1957. 173pp.
Christine Brooke-Rose, Thru, first pub. 1975. 165pp.

WomanTheory, Anon on Christine Brooke-Rose (here)
Poetry Foundation, Christine Brooke-Rose (here)