Margo Lanagan - Black Juice

After reading Tender Morsels, I was determined to hunt down more of Margo Lanagan's work, and the library was good enough to supply me with some of her short story collections. I picked up this one first for the simple reason that it had a medal on the cover (2004 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards), thus proving that I am easily swayed by awards and other cheap tricks.

'Singing My Sister Down' has become quite well known; it's a quiet, ruthless story that has real overtones of horror for me. A young boy and his family head to the tar pits for a ceremonial picnic and singing session during the hours of his older sister's ceremonial execution. Lanagan's skill in building up a society that has alien customs but familiar interpersonal dynamics is displayed beautifully here, as the family's bickering and love and shared grief are played out against the strange, slow, slow ritual of death.

I found 'My Lord's Man' to be the weakest story of the bunch, not because it isn't well written but because it doesn't have as much of a narrative as the others. It paints a clear picture of three people and the complicated ways in which they relate to one another, judge one another, and forgive one another. But it feels -- not quite incomplete, but lost. As though it needs to be part of a larger whole.

'Red Nose Day', on the other hand, was my favourite. The story of a pair of assassins that slowly expands and expands into something weirder and deeper, it's got the perfect balance of tension and instant strong characterisation. It's a truly bizarre, chillingly imagined tale that reads like Terry Pratchett by way of Stephen King; you're not sure if it's a joke, but you certainly don't feel like laughing. In fact, you feel like backing away gently and hoping it doesn't notice.

When I was quite young my grandfather, who's spent a lot of his life in places like Sri Lanka and India and Bangladesh, wrote and illustrated a wonderful book for me, from the point of view of a labour elephant who had a lot of strange adventures with his handler. It was the first thing I thought of when reading 'Sweet Pippit', which tells the story of a group of elephants in search of their favourite human, who has been arrested and taken away from them. Once again Lanagan mixes recognisable human culture with the fantastical creation that is the elephants' customs, personalities, and powers. And I think that if elephants had names for themselves, they would absolutely be things like Booroondoonhooroboom.

I'm still not sure what to think of 'House of the Many'. Without a doubt it's incredibly well put together, once again abandoning normal fantasy tropes for the scarier and closer-to-home details of a cultish group of people controlled by a single man, seen through the eyes of a small boy. (Margo Lanagan, like Diana Wynne Jones, seems to have a fondness for child narrators.) But I think I was hoping it would lead up to something bigger.

I really liked 'Wooden Bride' but again felt that it could be more effective if it was part of something longer. Maybe because the idea of it -- 'bridehood' as an event that has nothing to do with men and everything to do with girls coming into their own, all the trappings of a wedding blurred into myth and meaningless ritual -- was something that made me yearn to see a wider context, instead of a short vignette that gives the bare bones of the concept and not much more.

'Earthly Uses' is a really fucking creepy story about a boy who lives with his abusive grandfather, and is sent to fetch an angel to heal his dying grandmother. Except 'angels', in this story, are definitely not the shining intermediaries we associate with the word. Gah. I still get shivers thinking about this one, which I suppose means it's a very effective piece of storytelling.

I let out a cheer when I worked out that 'Perpetual Light' was recognisably set in Australia; most of Lanagan's stories are set in unnamed and/or unrecognisable cultures, and there's a sad dearth of Australian urban fantasy or sci-fi in general. To be honest I'm still not entirely sure what parts of it are about -- I'd need to reread it, I think -- but there are definite themes of environmentalism and family, a much more science fiction feel than any of the other stories in the collection, and a kind of mild, dusty dystopia that I loved because it was based firmly in the NSW bush. I also thought the narrator, Daphne, was a great character. I would happily read novels worth of this particular world.

'Yowlinin' was another favourite of mine, largely for the narrator -- a half-wild girl abandoned by her village because her parents were killed, a girl fiercely proud of her independence and scornful of everyone else, but also with a bit of a crush on one of the village boys -- and partly because I think it had the most effective pacing and plot. Like 'Earthly Uses', it features the kind of magical creatures that you're likely to have nightmares about.

'Rite of Spring', about a boy who participates unwillingly in a harsh and dangerous ritual that is needed to bring about the start of spring, is another one that has a strong sense of myth to it, with the struggle of human beings against the grudging elements, and the idea that our rituals and beliefs have real consequences.

All in all, this collection left me with both a wild jealousy for Lanagan's powers of imagination and language, and a desire to snap up all her other books as soon as possible.

Margo Lanagan - Tender Morsels

I didn't know what I was getting into when I pulled this book off the library shelf. I'd heard the name of it bandied about on other blogs, and I'd heard it recommended by people whose tastes I generally trust, but my knowledge of the book itself was something like: another YA fairytale retelling? Maybe? Kind of...dark?

Hoo boy.

For one thing, I don't know how many teenagers I'd give this one to. For another, it's not trying to retell any one existing fairytale that I'm aware of, though it has elements woven through it that seem very familiar in an old, forest-dark, Brothers Grimm kind of a way. It's set in two worlds: the 'true' world, and an 'ideal' world, or personal heaven, to which a young woman called Liga escapes with her daughters. The book is about the reasons for that escape, and what happens when the barriers between the worlds start to break down. I won't say a lot more about the plot itself because I found that going into it with no expectations was actually a good way to do it.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to twig to the fact that this is, starkly and insistently, a book about rape culture. It's about female sexuality. It's about the policing of female sexuality, and the ownership of it, and how difficult it is to understand your own emerging sexuality as a growing girl enmeshed in a society that keeps trying to tell you how and when and to what extent you should be exercising it. (It's also, well, about rape and sexual abuse of children, and while the scenes are never graphically described, I imagine it would be very triggering for some.)

The other main theme is related, but wider in scope. It asks the questions: to what extent can we, and to what extent should we, protect our children? Where do we draw the line between sheltering their innocence and keeping them wilfully ignorant? Given power and choice, should life be enjoyed, or should it be lived? Should it be narrow and comfortable, or painful and rich? Lanagan never flinches from portraying these questions, and the characters caught up in them, as complex and morally conflicted. She doesn't lead us easily towards the answers, and she doesn't pretend that good will always win out, even though the pursuit and possibility of justice is another theme that shines through.

There were a couple of niggling complaints that I had with the book as a whole; most significantly, I found the pacing to fall entirely flat. It wasn't until I was well over halfway through the book that I found myself wanting to keep turning the pages to find out What Would Happen Next; up until that point some things had happened, sure, but I hadn't been given any sense of overarching plot or tension. That said, I was interested enough in the characters and the subtle world-building to keep going, and everything did more or less draw together by the end.

Tender Morsels is a dark fairytale. But the creeping insidious horror of the book isn't any particular monster, or any one evil villain; it's the hovering phantom of male control over female sexuality, the phantom of rape culture. By the end of it I felt bruised and shaken and furious on behalf of the characters, and on behalf of everyone who's ever had to put up with misogynist language and entitlement and sexual harrassment and communities structured in such a way so as to endorse sexual double standards. This book will make you angry. Read it anyway. Read it because.

Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang

This blog was created with the intent of writing about my experiences as a medical student/maybe a junior doctor, but I've come to the realisation that I don't really want to blog about my education and my professional life; if a blog is to have any chance at longevity, it will need to be something I can work on as an escape from the medical world. And the only other thing I do enough of, it seems, is reading books. So let's see how that works out.

The champagne bottle to be smashed against the blog's creaking hull is Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), chosen for the highly creative reason that it's the first book I've finished since deciding to give this book-blogging thing a go. (No, I tell a lie: the first book I finished was Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, but me trying to review that would be laughable at best and also lend a very misleading tone to the blog as a whole. Besides, I'd been slogging away at that one for months, and anything related to Plato or Socrates or really anything pre-Renaissance is at this point a far-off and distant dream.) I picked up True History because I'm in the middle of a personal project to read every book that's ever won either the Man Booker Prize or the Man Asian Literary Prize. Honest to God, I am least one-third as pretentious as this makes me sound. I merely have a weakness for lists on which items can be crossed off, and a few of my very favourite books of all time have won the Booker, so I thought I'd expand my horizons a little. And cross some things off lists while I was at it.

Like the terrible, terrible Aussie that I am, I had been putting off reading this particular book. Peter Carey is one of only two authors to have won the Booker twice (the other being J.M. Coetzee), and of his other winning book Oscar and Lucinda I can remember very little beyond the fact that there was a church made of glass in it, what more could you possibly want? But I knew that True History was written using vernacular, and I wasn't sure that I would find such unconventional language easy going.

I'm pleased to tell you that I was completely wrong.

The book is a fictional memoir of one of the most recognisable figures in Australian history, the bushranger Ned Kelly. I honestly have no idea if anyone outside of Australia is like to have heard of him (there was a movie? Orlando Bloom and Heath Ledger were in it?) but here down under he's certainly a Thing. One of our better-known artists, Sidney Nolan, did a series of paintings of him, like this:

The letterbox-head is an instantly recognisable motif, drawing on the fact that Kelly and his gang wore plate metal armour in that shape.

However: the book itself. Edward 'Ned' Kelly, farmer turned bushranger, eldest son of a poor Irish family, is writing out his life story for his daughter to read. It's very difficult not to feel for this sober, hard-working, furious boy, to whom family is everything and poverty is truth and justice is nowhere.

As far as the writing style is concerned, Carey's done something that I think is quite spectacular: by roughing up the syntax entirely, removing most punctuation and leaving the grammar to fend for itself, he's managed to write a highly lyrical book that nonetheless manages to convince us that it could have been written by a poorly educated man with a natural gift for metaphor.

When our brave parents was ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history and every dear familiar thing had been abandoned on the docks of Cork or Galway or Dublin then the Banshee come on board the cursed convict ships the ROLLA and the TELICHERRY and the RODNEY and the PHOEBE DUNBAR and there were not an English eye could see her no more than an English eye can picture the fire that will descend upon that race in time to come. The Banshee sat herself at the bow and combed her hair all the way from Cork to Botany Bay she took passage amongst our parents beneath that foreign flag 3 crosses nailed one atop the other.

For all that Ned Kelly's voice sounds Irish, the book feels deeply Australian; the descriptions of the bush ring true, and there's a lot of commentary about Australia itself as a fledgling colonial place starting to find its own identity as a settlement built by, but so remote from, England.

And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow. In the hut at Faithfull's Creek I seen proof that if a man could tell his true history to Australians he might be believed it is the clearest sight I ever seen and soon Joe seen it too.

UNFAIRNESS. It deserves the caps. A major theme of the book is that of injustice, betrayal, how anger can be forged into action, how life takes more from -- and piles more onto the heads of -- those who can least afford it, and how theft and murder and rebellion can become the only paths that seem sensible when the world is slowly destroying you and the ones you love. It's certainly not a cheerful book, and I don't think I could even describe it as 'uplifting', but I didn't come out of it feeling like my soul was crushed beyond repair or anything like that. Mostly I wanted to roll around in the sentences some more.

True History has won prizes out the wazoo, and I think it deserves every one of them. It's beautifully and unconventionally written, the plot is never slow or boring, and it grabs your emotions firmly by the collar and drags you along with them.

Finally, I was delighted to find in the book a quote directly addressing the fact that Australia as a country has a tendency to celebrate things that maybe aren't the most deserving of celebration (eg. ANZAC Day, the great patriotic public holiday on which we celebrate a crushing defeat!). For all his criminality, Ned Kelly holds the same sort of romantic, adventurous, folk-hero appeal as Robin Hood. This novel has also brought home to me the extent to which he, as a poor Irish-Australian criminal, stood at the time for resistance against the English, who were the authorities in the colony of Victoria.

What is it about us Australians eh? he demanded. What is wrong with us? Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might we not find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves?

This Australian's opinion is that Peter Carey can go on making spectacles like this one for as long as he wants.