Kirsten Tranter's A Common Loss: Two reviews

Next Thursday is International Women's day and author Kirsten Tranter, a supporter of The Stella Prize, will be speaking at numerous venues around Sydney, including on a panel at Katoomba with authors Tara Moss and Claire Corbett. The topic for the day, inspired by VS Naipaul's famous dismissal of women's writing as instantly recognisable and inferior to his own, is: "Do women write differently from men?" Details of the various Stella events scheduled around the country can be found on the Stella events webpage; details for the Katoomba event here.

Tranter's second novel, A Common Loss, has been received to wide acclaim. Two guest authors have chosen to review Tranter's book for the AWW challenge, poet Phillip A Ellis and novelist Lisa Walker.  Lisa today posted the full review on her website and provided AWW with the following extract. Lisa writes:

A Common Loss is Australian author Kirsten Tranter’s second novel. Her first, The Legacy, was an assured, fresh retelling of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.

A Common Loss tells the story of five friends who meet at university and keep in touch over the next ten years. Following the death of one of their number, Dylan, the friends re-group for their annual visit to Las Vegas.

The story starts with the narrator, Elliot, remembering a car accident the five had together. The driver, Cameron, swerves to avoid a deer and they crash. Cameron has been drinking, so Dylan claims to be the driver. As the years go by, whenever Elliot remembers the crash, it is Dylan who he sees at the wheel. This trick of the memory becomes a motif for the story.

Elliot, a professor of literature, sees himself as a bit of an outsider in the group. With Dylan, who Elliot idealised, removed, tensions rise and relationships buckle under strain. Elliot discovers that not all of his friends viewed Dylan the same way he did. Dylan’s death sets events in train where each friend is forced to reveal long-hidden secrets...

The full review appears on Lisa's blog here.

Lisa describes her own novel, Liar Bird, as "possibly the first romantic comedy about feral pigs". Her next novel, about a timid erotic writer, comes out in January 2013. She writes, works and surfs on the far north coast of New South Wales and is studying towards a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland."



The second review is by poet Phillip A Ellis. Phillip writes:

It is true that I do not read as much women's writing as I should, with a tiny amount of that being by Australians. Hence my involvement in the Australian Women Writers Reading and Reviewing Challenge of2012. Because I want to remedy that lack, and because I want to demonstrate my support for my fellow writers, and because I especially want to support writers whose work I appreciate and love, it is with delight that I have been given the chance to review A Common Loss by Kirsten Tranter; her two novels have become favourites of mine for a number of reasons that I will be discussing in this review. This chance, the chance to support a writer whose work I admire, fits in with the challenge, and it fits in with my love of good writing.

Five friends--Elliott, Brian, Tallis, Cameron and Dylan--have been friends since college, and since college have held annual vacations in Las Vegas. This year, things are different: Dylan the peacemaker, the glue that keeps the friends together, has died in an accident, and the remaining four are left facing the secrets that bound them to him. Secrets which threaten them in turn, seeming to promise the dissolution, not only of the friendships, but of their careers and reputations. A Common Loss deals with these, being set in Las Vegas, a place where artifice and reality intermingle, and where moral certainties can be set adrift, and it deals with the relationships between friendship and secrets, grief and betrayal, all while the spectre of Tennyson's In Memoriam weaves through the narrative as a form of parallel text.

There are a number of ways that two texts may parallel each other. For example, two narratives may directly parallel each other, incident for incident, or they may counterpoint each other. There may be a shared language, a shared worldview or shared mood or voice. And there may also be a shared setting or set of characters. While it may be common to expect the texts to be narratives, such as two novels or other forms of fiction, it is rarer for the texts to differ in the way that they do here. In Memoriam is a lyric elegy, whereas A Common Loss is less of an elegy and more a narrative whose inciting act is the death of Dylan, and the losses that arise out of his death. There are, however, many ways in which the two texts parallel each other.

Given that In Memoriam encodes the obsessive nature of grief and mourning, so that the text itself returns repeatedly to the image of the dead man mourned, so to is A Common Loss haunted by Dylan. As a way of understanding this, if we consider that Julius CaesarIn Memoriam also serves as a thematic thread in the narrative. I won't say exactly how, save that it has relevance for the narrator, Elliott, and his relationship with Dylan.

And it is the relationships that define the narrative and the ethos of the book. As a result, while A Common Loss is literary, it does not smell of lamp oil, precisely as a result of its narrative emphasis on the shifting relationships. There is the relationship between Brian and Cynthia, and between Cynthia and Elliott, as well as Elliott and Natasha; while each does not dominate the narrative, they form part of the shifting play of attraction and allegiances, the attraction between the men and women, and the allegiances between the friends, so that the novel is dominated by their fluid interweavings and interactions. There is a skill to this writing, and this skill is evident in the way the characters shift and react towards and against each other.

This skill also extends to the writing. It is literate, eschewing the easy attraction of generic simplicity for ambiguous complexity, and the characters details are deftly handled in such a manner as to sustain narrative tension and believability. It is also, as a result, compassionate. The onstensible antagonist is revealed as equally believable as the others, all of whom are united by an emphasis on their relationships with each other and the absent Dylan. Furthermore, the characters are believable: there is a sense that these are people who could exist, who could live and breathe, and meet our understanding of what a real person is.

And the compassion of the writing extends to the characters themselves. There are, that is, no black-and-white characters, no heroes or villains, only the protagonists, their primary antagonist, and the more shadowy, elusive figures that mainly appear for a moment then fade. By concentrating so centrally on the friends and Cynthia, A Common Loss reinforces its focus on their relationships with Dylan. So that, while there is scope for a much wider cast of characters, the focus on the central group is integral to the novel and its concerns. This focus works with the characters' believability, so that their roundedness works with us to create a sense of engagement. We believe in them, that is, and we are concerned with the outcome of their shared dilemma.  

A Common Loss is only Kirsten Tranter's second published novel. Yet it is a skilled novel, one that uses In Memoriam both as a parallel text and thematic concern. It is also literate; and it does not smell of lamp oil. Its writing is compassionate, its characters also believable and treated in a compassionate manner, and, as a result of these, I can only admit that A Common Loss is a major contribution to contemporary Australian literary fiction. While it is a quibble to consider the use of the American characters and setting as somehow unAustralian, it is a false quibble. A Common Loss is Australian precisely because it is develops an Australian sensibility, an Australian worldview, even as it deals with the wider world. And it is these two that really make Australian writing, and Australian women's writing, as distinctive and worthy of serious consideration as it is, despite our cultures' wider neglect.


Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic, poet and scholar, and his poetry collection, The Flayed Man, has been published by Gothic Press; Gothic Press will also edit a collection of essays on Ramsey Campbell, that he is editing with Gary William Crawford. He is working on another collection, to appear through Diminuendo Press. Another collection has been accepted by Hippocampus Press, which has also published his concordance to the poetry of Donald Wandrei. He is the editor of Melaleuca. He has recently had Symptoms Positive and Negative, a chapbook of poetry about his experiences with schizophrenia, published by Picaro Press.


A Common Loss / Kirsten Tranter (Sydney : Fourth Estate, 2012) ISBN: 978-0-7322-9082-5

Available from participating AWW booksellers:
Print copy:
Abbeys Bookshop, Sydney
Shearers Bookshop, Leichhardt, NSW
Better Read Than Dead, Newtown, NSW

Ebook:
PNP Booksellers Mosman, NSW
Avid Reader, Brisbane
The Book Shuttle
Readings

Australian Online Bookshop

Have you read or reviewed either of Kirsten Tranter's books? What did you think? Feel free to add your link.

"Unexpectedly hopeful and funny": Jaye Ford reviews Nicola Moriarty's Free Falling

Jaye Ford is an internationally published Australian author of suspense novels. Her first novel, Beyond Fear, was the highest selling debut crime novel in Australia last year. It also sold in Europe and will be translated into six languages this year. Her second novel, Scared Yet, is released today (March 1, 2012).

For the Australian Women Writers Challenge, Jaye has chosen to review Nicola Moriarty's Free Falling. It was a novel that touched her deeply, for reasons she explains.

Jaye writes:

In Nicola Moriarty’s Free Falling, Belinda is on a downward spiral as she struggles to cope with the sudden death of her fiancé, Andy. Her almost mother-in-law Evelyn is on her own difficult journey but actually free-falling – from planes. For a story about grief and closure and finding yourself after the pain of loss, it is unexpectedly hopeful and funny.

I write thrillers and for several years, haven’t dipped into much beyond the crime genre. But that’s not the reason why, after only a couple of pages, I wasn’t sure I could write an objective review of this book.

I lost my father last year and, strangely, I have a friend called Belinda who lost her husband of less-than-a-year while she was pregnant with their first child, as Moriarty’s Belinda discovers of herself. For me, this story was difficult to read, both for the reminder of my own and my friend’s loss and for the light touch on such painful subject. Also, because it brought me to tears several times while I was on a long-haul international flight.

As I read Belinda’s point-of-view, I kept wanting to get her some help and find her better friends. While Evelyn was written as hard and unforgiving, I empathised with her need to deal with the loss of her son in her own way.

That’s not to say Moriarty hasn’t done a terrific job, demonstrating she has her own fair share of her family’s genes – her sisters Liane and Jaclyn are bestselling authors. In Free Falling, Belinda and Evelyn are believable and sympathetic in their sorrow. In telling their stories, they both skirt around the intense pain of Andy’s loss – Belinda trying to avoid the truth of her future and Evelyn attempting to ignore her past. And don’t we all do that?

There is also humour – nutty moments that work amidst the sadness. Just like real life. The ending is sweet and hopeful - and although at the start, I thought it wasn’t a book for someone who was grieving, I’m not sure something sweet and hopeful would be so bad.

Jaye is a former journalist and public relations consultant, who now writes full-time. Her website:

www.jayefordauthor.com

To win one of 20 Jaye Ford book packs, see Random House's promotion (competition closes 02/02/12). 


Print copy available from AWW supporters:
Pages and Pages Booksellers, Mosman NSW
Better Read Than Dead, Newtown, NSW
Abbey's Bookshop, Sydney
Umina Book Bazaar
The Book Shuttle

Ebook available from AWW supporters
Avid Reader, West End, Brisbane, QLD
Readings, Vic
Fullers, Leichardt, NSW
Australian Online Bookshop. 

If you are an Aussie Bookshop who has been actively supporting the AWW challenge and you're not represented here, please let AWW know by leaving a comment.

Australian Romance writing - what's there to take seriously?

Last weekend saw the annual Australian Romance Readers Awards.

Once again, Australian author Anna Campbell won Favourite Australian Romance Author as well as the Favourite Historical Romance category for her book Midnight's Wild Passion.

Other authors present at the awards dinner included AWW challenge participant Helene Young, whose book, Shattered Sky, won Favourite Romantic Suspense, multiple ARRA award-winner Kandy Shepherd, Lisa Heidke, Rachael Johns, Sharon Archer, Beverley Eikli, internationally best-selling author Keri Arthur, and witty guest speaker Paula Roe.

But how many Australian readers and booksellers have heard of these talented, successful Australian authors?

Of all the women writers in Australia, romance writers are among the most under-recognised, despite their success internationally.They are victims not only of gender bias, but also of genre bias. In the lead-up to International Women's Day (March 8) and The Stella Prize discussions on the nature of women's writing (whether it differs from men's), maybe it's time to question why romance writers and their chosen genre have yet to achieve the respect they deserve.

In recent years, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) has been established in an effort to address this very problem. The first IASPR international conference was held in Brisbane in 2009. Since then, the association has flourished, attracting an increasing number scholars, including some notable Australians such as Juliet Flesch and author Bronwyn Parry who insist on taking romance writing seriously.

One independent scholar writing in the romance field is Laura Vivanco, contributor to the influential blog, Teach Me Tonight. Laura kindly sent AWW an overview of Australian romance fiction, gleaned from For Love and Money, her study of popular romance writing. It's published here in honour of St Valentine's Day and the official launch of the National Year of Reading.

Laura Vivanco's Guest Post:

Australian romance fiction has often touched on issues affecting Australian society. For colonial women writers, for example, “the themes of romance fiction must have resonated with their own predicaments in a new country” (Gelder and Weaver 1) and “colonial romance provided a crucial site for the struggle over the model of womanhood that seemed best to express the aspirations of an emergent nation” (2). 

In the 1940s, weekly women’s magazines

had short story features in every issue, and in the last years of the war and the early years of the post-war period the overwhelming bulk of short fiction in these magazines concerned the problems of returning soldiers. [...] In most stories the men returned embittered, angry, broken, jealous, moody and in many respects unwilling or unable to resume their former roles. The women they love are required to coax these men back to the path of love and faithfulness, and in most cases, after many travails, they succeed. (Garton 59)

When

[Joyce] Dingwell’s The Girl from Snowy River (1959) was published, a tale of an English woman emigrating to Australia, [Alan] Boon [of Mills & Boon] sent a copy to the Hon. A. R. Downer, MP (then Australian Minister of Immigration), at Australia House, with the message, ‘We feel it is good propaganda for immigration.’ (McAleer 103)

[Australian author] Melissa James has written of her first novel, Her Galahad (2002) that it is

a based-on-fact book, gleaned from my Aboriginal History course in 1999. [...] I read that [...] the Australian Government had regularly given fake death certificates to members of the Stolen Generation (Aboriginal kids taken from their families) for their parents, so they wouldn’t go home and look for their heritage, and blend into white society. Those same kids (the girls) quite often lost their children - told they were dead, and the government adopted them out to white families. And many of those boys ended up in prison, on real or fake charges.

I had to write the story then. I studied up the subject, checked facts, finished my course and wrote the story of Tessa and Jirrah. A few people have condemned the book as implausible and unrealistic, even ridiculed it. But it is fact. (Sova)

Juliet Flesch, in her history of modernAustralian popular romance novels, while she acknowledges that “not all Australian romance novelists set all their novels in Australia nor do they all attempt a distinctively Australian idiom” (250), goes as far as to argue that “They do [...] speak with a voice that is distinctively Australian [...] in general they endorse qualities of openness, inclusion, egalitarianism, community spirit and self-reliance” (296). 

Be that as it may (as a non-Australian I feel unqualified to judge the Australian-ness of all Australian romance novels, but I’m wary of generalisations), I did notice that although [Australian romance author] Marion Lennox’s Princess of Convenience is set in a fictional European principality, the patterns in the Australian heroine’s weaving recall the waves of the seas surrounding Australia, while the novel’s treatment of time and death may have been influenced by Aboriginal attitudes towards journeying (see For Art and Money pages 183-193).

Like Marion Lennox’s heroine, Australian romances have often had to travel abroad to find a home. Hsu-Ming Teo has observed that:

conditions of national and international Anglophone publishing in the twentieth century [...] shaped Australian popular fiction in such a way that women’s romance novels remained tied to the apron strings of empire, attentive to the demands of British editors and an overseas market even as a distinctive postcolonial ‘Australianness’ was asserted. (qtd. in Sarwal xi)

Joyce Dingwell, “Mills & Boon’s first native Australian author” (McAleer 102) was first published by the company in 1955 but it was not until 1974 that the by then Harlequin Mills & Boon “established an office in Sydney, Australia” (McWilliam 6) and not until 2006 that

the company hired its first Australian Commissioning Editor, signaling its tentative shift away from a branch office operation, which distributes products created elsewhere, and towards a creative branch, which distributes products it has created. While Australian authors had featured among Harlequin-Mills & Boon’s most successful authors for years, they had, until 2006, been commissioned through the publisher’s North American or British editorial offices. (McWilliam 8-9)

This would appear to have been a short-lived experiment, however, because Mills & Boon’s Australian website currently states that “the Australian office is a sales and marketing office. All of our editorial staff work through offices in the UK and North America”. It remains the case that, as the Romance Writers of Australia acknowledge:

Most of us are first published in Nth. America or the UK and our books are imported or reprinted here. Australian publishers publish very little romance [...]. [...] Our authors are published by Avon Books (Harper Collins), Bantam Books, Harlequin (Mills and Boon), Hodder & Stoughton (UK) NAL and Berkley Books (Penguin/Putnam ), Simon & Schuster, Transworld, Robert Hale (UK), Virgin Publishing, UK.

A few are published mainly within Australia/NZ: Pan MacMillan, Random House, JB publishing. Many more are published in e-book format, which is a growing international field.

Unfortunately, despite the international success of Australian romance authors, their novels have not tended to be treated with a great deal of respect. Ann Curthoys and John Docker summed up the situation:

romance fiction [...] has been high literature’s Other, a negative icon, what not, what never to be. Newspaper critics in reviews, journalists in their columns, good professional-middle-class people in their conversation, would casually snap at a book or passage by saying things like ‘it unfortunately smacks of Mills and Boon’.

Australian romance authors, though, have been known to snap back. 

In Nicola Marsh’s Contract to Marry there’s a secondary character who reads and defends romances (see For Love and Money page 115) and the dedication of my book, “To every Harlequin Mills & Boon romance author who has ever been asked ‘When are you going to write a real novel?’,” was inspired by a conversation in [Australian romance author] Valerie Parv’s The Love Artist, in which a cartoonist describes a common, prejudiced, response to his work. I’ll give the last words, though, to [best-selling Australian romance author] Anne Gracie:

In every genre, there are novels that are clichéd and poorly written, and some books that are wonderfully written with unforgettable characters and prose that sings. Romance is no different. It’s a huge genre, with an enormous range and variety. Don't judge a whole genre by a few books.

[End Guest Post by Laura Vivanco]


AWW writes:

If you want to pick up an ebook bargain for Valentine's Day from an Aussie bookshop which supports the AWW challenge, you can buy Anna Campbell's Courtesan trilogy for under $15 from The Book Shuttle, Avid Readers Bookshop, or Pages&Pages Booksellers. Australian Online Bookshop also has a tab for Australian Women Writers on their ebook website, but Anna's collection doesn't appear to be available from them. All of the bookshops have Anna's other titles, however, for well under $10. One best-selling Australian romance author, whom Laura doesn't mention in her post, is Stephanie Laurens. Her ebooks can also be found at these ebookstores. 

------ Notes for Laura's Post ------

Curthoys, Ann and John Docker. “Popular Romance in the Postmodern Age. And an Unknown Australian Author.” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 4.1 (1990). 

Flesch, Juliet. From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels. Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004.

Garton, Stephen.“‘Fit Only for the Scrap Heap’: Rebuilding Returned Soldier Manhood in Australia after 1945. ” Gender & History 20.1 (2008): 48–67.

Gelder, Ken and Rachael Weaver. The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction. Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2010.

Gracie, Anne. “Romantic Myths.”

McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

McWilliam, Kelly. “Romance in Foreign Accents: Harlequin - Mills & Boon in Australia.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.2 (2009): 137-145. Rpt. at the University of Southern Queensland’s ePrintsArchive.

Mills & Boon. “Author Guidelines.” 28 Jan. 2012. 

Romance Writers of Australia. “The Romance Genre.” 28 Jan. 2012. 

Sarwal, Amit. Foreword. Sold by the Millions: Australia’s Bestsellers. Ed. Toni Johnson-Woods and Amit Sarwal. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. viii-xvi.

Sova, Cathy. “New Faces 136: Melissa James.” The Romance Reader. 16 Nov. 2002.

Vivanco, Laura. For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance. Tirril, Penrith: Humanities Ebooks, 2011.

Laura Vivanco is an independent scholar, a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and a regular contributor to Teach Me Tonight, a blog devoted to discussing romance fiction from an academic perspective.

Marketing the Boundaries: the fiction of Margo Lanagan

Prize-winning Australian author Margo Lanagan's novel Sea Hearts will be launched at The Hobart Bookshop tomorrow.* Author Krissy Kneen says of Sea Hearts "In Margo's skillful hands we are woven a tale that resonates with so much in our real lives... a longing for something that is missing from our hearts". Her review of the novel, written for the AWW challenge, can be found here.

Last week, Claire Corbett wrote an article on Lanagan's earlier work which questions the common classification of Lanagan's audience as primarily Young Adult (YA). Corbett's post has already appeared in short form on her own blog and in full at Online Opinion. She kindly gave permission to cross-post an extract here.

Claire Corbett writes:

I’ve just read my first Margo Lanagan books, two collections of short stories titled Red Spikes and Yellowcake. The colour theme is upheld through two other collections, Black Juice and White Time. The covers are also consistent, each showing a feminine figure in a mysterious landscape with totemic creature spirit: butterfly, beetle, spider. I mention this because marketing a writer with a consistent approach is one of the themes of my review; it intrigues me in Margo Lanagan’s case because it says much about the state of literature in this country.

Lanagan is a literary writer, a writer’s writer with a beautiful turn of phrase ("drops of salt sorrow in its strands here and there like smooth-tumbled crystals in a cunning necklace" – Chapter 2, "The Golden Shroud") and a rigorous style. The quality of her writing has been recognised with several World Fantasy Awards and Printz Honor Awards. What intrigues me is why has Lanagan’s work been corralled within the definition of Young Adult (YA) fiction? I am not suggesting there is anything lesser about YA fiction, nor do I know how Lanagan herself feels about this.

To me though, classifying Lanagan’s work as YA makes about as much sense as classifying Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Jonathan Swift or Robert Louis Stevenson as YA writers. Just because some of her protagonists are young and just because there are fantasy elements in her stories do not seem valid reasons.

Lanagan’s subject matter is dark and adult, though I think teenagers should read it. They should read Carter, Calvino, Swift and Stevenson too. In Red Spikes, for example, there is a clever, brutal story, "Monkeys Paternoster", about the overthrow of the alpha male of a monkey colony, told from the point of view of a young female. She sees baby monkeys butchered by aspiring bachelor males who then rape their mothers; her own rape is vividly described. In what sense is this story not adult?

The controversy that blew up in 2011 over Lanagan's Tender Morsels at the Bitch Media website# originates partly in this confusion over what is/is not YA. The website published a list of 100 Young Adult books for the feminist reader. After a complaint accused the novel of failing to critique characters who used rape as a tool of vengeance, Tender Morsels was removed from the list, sparking furious debate...

Read more of Corbett's discussion here. Please feel free to comment below

Claire Corbett

Claire Corbett was born in Canada and moved to Australia as a child. She has had essays and stories broadcast on Radio National and published in Cinema Papers, Picador New Writing and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others. She has completed the MA Writing (UTS), has taught at UTS and undertook a Varuna Mentorship with Amanda Lohrey in 2000.

Corbett's own novel, When We Have Wings, also arguably defies generic pigeonholing, although Claire describes it as a "speculative fiction crime novel". It was published by Allen & Unwin in July 2011.

Notes:
* According to Lanagan's blog, Sea Hearts will be published as The Brides of Rollrock Island by David Fickling Books and Jonathan Cape in the UK, and by Knopf in the US.
# Lanagan's response to the Bitch Media website controversy, dated 3 February 2010, is archived here.

"Pride and deepest fear": Kate Grenville's Dark Places - Review (of sorts) by Katherine Howell

Last year I stood in the authors’ green room at the Brisbane Writers Festival while friend and author Veny Armanno introduced me to one of my writing heroes, Kate Grenville. I’m not sure what I gabbled out: whether I told her about the snail-mail fan letter I’d sent via her publisher years before, telling her how much I loved her work and that I too was writing a book; whether I said how thrilled I was when she wrote back to thank me and wish me all the best. 

I have a feeling that I didn’t manage to say anything very sensible at all, but I remember that when I held out for signing my copy of her new book, Sarah Thornhill, and my beaten-up, brown-paged, dog-eared and worn copy of my all-time favourite of her books, Dark Places, that she turned that one over and over in her hands and said, ‘Now this is well-loved’.

              

Dark Places tells the story of Albion Gidley Singer, father of Lilian who was the star of Grenville’s book Lilian’s Story which was actually published first. Grenville has said that having put Albion on the page in LS, where he abuses, stalks, threatens, and assaults Lilian before finally having her committed to an asylum, she wanted to explore how he became that man. Sounds grim, I know. And it is—but at the same time Dark Places has an extraordinary voice I can’t get enough of and a dramatic irony that makes its reading a total joy.

I wanted to write in detail here about the character of Albion, getting across the sense of how he strives for his father’s approval and is hurt by his careless dismissal but then later does the same to Lilian with a complete lack of insight; how he believes that women are always thinking about sex, that even baby Lilian when she stamps in his lap knows exactly what she is doing, that when they say no they really mean yes and actually more please; how when he feels threatened or weak (which is often) he takes his fear and anger out on those around him—but to boil down Grenville’s deft prose into anything more than that bald summary is beyond me.

‘I lay under the coarse cold sheet [in the boarding school dorm], with no possibility of arms around me, and felt a fear like no other, a fear that squeezed cold tears out from under my tight-shut eyelids. “I cannot bear it, I cannot,” I tried to tell that fear, but it would not leave me, but froze my heart with its emptiness, left me sucked dry and shivering, a dead leaf in the wind. I lay very still and tried to resist that nagging fear, like a flow of cold water, that was never far from me, the fear that this was what life was, for ever and ever until you died: being locked up within yourself, all alone, having to pretend all the time, every minute, that you were absolutely perfectly all right.’ (16)

‘But if I unfolded the petals of my embattled self to Cargill, if I allowed his arms around me, his whisper in my hair, and the fondness in his eyes: if I let myself be undone by all this, and stand naked in the blast of love, I would risk the worst death of all. I would not survive such a death as that, as Cargill having opened my soul and then with his mild manner moved on, leaving me flayed. It was pride and deepest fear, and it left me dry-eyed and stony-hearted later, leaning on a fence, thinking with despair how much life I still had to live.’ (25)

Pride and deepest fear sums up Albion perfectly: it is what drives him in every situation. All makes him sound terrible, I know, and he is, and yet . . . it is a book I will read many times more.

Guest reviewer Katherine Howell is the author of the Detective Ella Marconi crime series. Silent Fear is the the fifth book in the series and will be released tomorrow, February 1, 2012. Her work has won awards and is published in multiple countries and languages. She teaches workshops in subjects including editing and suspense. So far, only one of Katherine's books, Frantic - her debut novel - has been reviewed for the AWW 2012 challenge. (See here for the review.)           

AWW upcoming releases and reviews

February sees the launch of new books by a number of outstanding Australian women who have offered their support to the AWW2012 challenge, including prize-winning author Margo Lanagan, Fantasy writer Tansy Rayner Roberts and crime author Katherine Howell.

Katherine Howell's new crime thriller, Silent Fear, is released this Wednesday, February 1. For a sneak peek, Katherine suggests going over to Varuna's website to hear her read an extract. Katherine will be AWW's first guest author to review for this blog, writing on Kate Grenville's 1994 novel Dark Places.

This Thursday, February 2, authors Margo Lanagan and Tansy Rayner Robers will jointly launch their novels at The Hobart Bookshop. (Details on Tansy's website here.) Margo's new release is Sea Hearts; Tansy's is Reign of Beasts the final book in The Creature Court trilogy.

Both Margo and Tansy have also agreed to be guest author reviewers for this blog. Tansy has yet to decide which book to review and Margo will discuss Kate Forsyth's forthcoming release, Bitter Greens. (Both Margo and Kate are best known for writing Young Adult Fantasy novels, however Kate's new book is written for adults.)

Have you read these authors' other works? Have you written a review?

Aboriginal Women Writers – The fight for Literacy and Literary Freedom

To celebrate Australia Day 2012, Australian Women Writers approached a number of prominent indigenous Australian women, including well-known fiction writer and National Year of Reading Ambassador, Dr Anita Heiss. Dr Heiss had a prior commitment writing for Mamamia and instead sent a list of her 10 favourite fiction titles (see below). Another Australian woman writer, Dr June Perkins, stepped in to discuss Indigenous women writers who paved the way for the success of contemporary authors such as Dr Heiss and others. Thanks, both Anita and June.

AWW's first guest blog: "Aboriginal Women Writers – The fight for Literacy and Literary Freedom and a true name calling" by Dr June Perkins

 
My search to understand and identify Aboriginal women’s literature began naively and in earnest with a letter to Oodgeroo (Noonuccal).* I was probably twenty and had heard a lot about her work in Aboriginal people gaining citizenship rights and was keen to interview her for an article I was writing. Instead she said I should contact younger people like Lydia Miller (Kuku Yalanji) as she was more contemporary than Oodgeroo.

I was interested in Aboriginal women’s literature because as a girl (Bush Mekeo/Írish/French Australian background) I wanted to find out about the stories of the original people of the land I lived in and see if they had anything in common with my own experience. 

I had forward-thinking teachers who had shared the sorry history of the treatment of Aboriginal people in Tasmania and so-called Aboriginal issues were not invisible to me. From a young age I was mistaken as Aboriginal and subsequently subjected to a lot of racist comments at school.

This made me both upset to be name-called and curious – and I was lucky to have people around me, including an Aboriginal girl from Mornington Island who was boarding and went to my school, and another classroom friend, to see that Aboriginal people were in many ways just like everyone else and I wondered why they were so put down.

They were not token friends, but very caring girls, and the girl from Mornington told the best ghost stories! Actually, come to think of it, my friends were all a mini united nations and we didn’t fit any moulds of what you might call "mainstream".

Many of the early writers like Oodgeroo and, with respect, the recently passed away Ruby Langford Ginibi (Bundjalung), began with a sense of connection to place, people and history. They wore the mantle of spokesperson for the cause of Aboriginal rights to be respected, acknowledged and treated the same as any other human being because they had realised the pen is a mighty tool in the fight for justice. There are so many writers that should be mentioned, like Jackie Huggins (Bidjara), a fearless academic and wonderful writer who wrote an innovative biography with her mother, Aunty Rita, who is still an active intellectual teaching in the university system.

For Langford-Ginibi, incarceration, justice and identity formed the themes of her life writing whilst for Oodgeroo, a poetry exploring people, place and environment was a major concern. Oodgeroo was also noted for her friendship with Judith Wright.

This fight for justice was often a heavy burden to bear, and it could have led to the pigeonholing of Aboriginal women’s writing, to be eternally from the fringes and fixated upon the human rights agenda, but instead they became the footsteps to follow in and add to. Aboriginal English made its way into Aboriginal literature so that writers were not forced to simply fit the canon of other Australian literature, but this in itself was a battle.

Now many years later, and having been mentored at a playwrights conference by Lydia, a wonderful actress, I am happy to say that I always look out for up-and-coming Aboriginal women writers. For me they can write about any topic from Murri lives in the Bush, like Vivienne Cleven's, Bitin’Back, to an Aboriginal woman bureaucrat in Paris like Anita Heiss (Wiradjuri). The beauty of Aboriginal women’s writing is its current diversity and moving away from set definitions.

There are many Aboriginal women writers in Australia who created the opportunities for the writers of today – not only Anita Heiss, but also Kerry Reed-Gilbert (Wiradjuri), Alexis Wright (Waanyi Nation), and Jennifer Martiniello (Arrente/Chinese/Anglo-celtic). I was happy to interview several of them when I was a uni student and to learn not only about their writing but their philosophies on life. They are different and yet many maintain close friendships with each other – Anita and Kerry are in constant touch, and another friend of theirs working in radio put me onto interviewing them. They encourage each other and the new generation of up and coming Aboriginal writers, both men and women.

Today’s writers, whilst they will often tackle identity and the continuing need for the recognition of Aboriginal people in the constitution, have created a literary freedom for a future generation of writers. They have been able to strive for a unity in their diversity of genres and voices – and have asked to be recognised as a non-homogenous group. 

They are happy to share their perspective as specific to a language group, urban or rural environment – and have pulled apart what it means to be black, Aboriginal, Indigenous and an Aboriginal woman. Aileen Moreton Robinson (Geonpul) and Leah Purcell (Goa Gungurri Wakka Wakka) both have works that tackle that diversity and need not to be subsumed into other’s agendas. Purcell’s Black Chick’s Talking is a remarkable set of interviews with a diverse group of creative Aboriginal women – which has an accompanying film, paintings and explores Aboriginal women’s creativity.

Aboriginal women writers have branched out to become fully part of the mainstream, and participate in genres like the "chick lit" written by Heiss in books like Paris Dreaming, as well as in film making. Although Heiss is not a writer anyone can pigeonhole having tackled almost every writing genre you can imagine and given it the stamp of her witty writing style.

Aboriginal women do not feel confined to write literature that is expected of them (there is a whole school of research into Aboriginal literature and art), but rather literature where they can explore new horizons. Yet, their unique ways of seeing the world can be incorporated into whatever fiction they write in subtle ways. They can pose questions like Am I black enough for you? and interrogate their own position with a freshness and humour past generations would not have even dreamed of – perhaps because back then it would have been a luxury and there were other more pressing needs.

Many Australians, particularly Aboriginal and well educated, are concerned at the low rates of literacy for many Aboriginal children. The Aboriginal Literacy Foundation states that 87% of Indigenous children in regional and remote areas struggle to read and write and fall well below the national literacy benchmarks. Many Aboriginal women (Heiss does lots of work in this area and so does runner Cathy Freeman) work extremely hard to encourage Aboriginal children to consider writing and reading cool things to do. Their commitment to education, literacy and in Heiss’s case the promulgation of other Aboriginal writers they respect and admire is inspiring. This is something that Aboriginal writers do not shy away from but embrace as communal responsibility.

The Aboriginal women of today, like those of the past, form footsteps for future Aboriginal women to walk in. Perhaps today’s dream is that one day Aboriginal people will walk alongside not only other Australian writers but Australian readers in terms of achievements in literacy.

*June's note: The language group/nation of Aboriginal women is included in brackets where I have been able to find it. 

June Perkins is a guest blogger for ABC open, poet and digital storyteller who is about to launch ebooks on the recovery from Cyclone Yasi process. She has guest blogged for Ilura Gazette and Critical Mass, and is currently a guest blogger for the Aftermath  project for ABC Open in North Queensland. You can find June on Facebook, Twitter (@gumbootpearlz), Flickr, as well as at her blogs: Aftermath, Pearlz Dreaming (WordPress), Unity Garden, Gumbootspearlz and at Book Creators Circle. 

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AWW writes: Which writers did Oodgeroo and early Indigenous Australian women writers pave the way for? Indigenous Australian writer Dr Anitia Heiss shares her list of "10 favourite novels by Indigenous Australian women":

1. Butterfly Song by Terri Janke 
2. Bitin’ Back by Vivienne Cleven 
3. Too Flash by Melissa Lucashenko
4. Carpentaria by Alexis Wright 
5. Swallow The Air by Tara June Winch 
6. Every Secret Thing by Marie Munkara 
7. Purple Threads by Jeanine Leane 
8. Watershed, by Fabienne Bayet-Charlton 
9. Legacy by Larissa Behrendt 
10. The Boundary by Nicole Watson

Have you chosen any of these books to read and review for the AWW challenge? If so, please comment below with a link to your review(s). Which other books by Indigenous Australian women - fiction and nonfiction - could you recommend?