The Transit of Venus – Shirley Hazzard (1980)

Shirley Hazzard is one of those writers who can skirt the borders of literary pretension and get away with it due to her beautiful writing style and her subtle skill with narrative form. Hazzard also has a splendid way of making an obtuse plot inviting, making The Transit of Venus a master class of highly literate writing that even those who feel most comfortable with so called genre novels can easily read and enjoy.

Hazzard is an Australian ex-pat who left the country in 1947 at the age of sixteen and as far as I can ascertain has never returned. She began the life of a writer in the early 1960’s when she submitted a short story that she’d written for her own enjoyment to The New Yorker and it was published. Since then there has been short story collections, non-fiction and four novels. Although Hazzard is not prolific, there was a gap of twenty-three years between Transit and The Great Fire (2003); she makes up for it with her sheer class.

The Transit of Venus is, on the surface, a story about two orphaned Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, who end up living in 1950’s England. The narrative takes place over four decades and follows their lives and, most significantly, their relationships. Love, with all its triumphs and tragedies, is central to the novel. Caroline has many suitors but it is her unrequited relationship with the long-suffering Astronomer Edmund Tice that gives the novel romantic tension. Using the actual transit of Venus as an analogy for the vagaries of romance, Hazzard milks it for all it’s worth. She suggests that like trying to observe the transit of Venus, you need to be in the right place at the right time to succeed romantically.

Thematically The Transit of Venus tackles not just the nature of love, but also gender politics, class, wartime morality and personal duplicity. One of the strengths of the novel is Hazzard’s skill in bringing the time period of the 1950’s to the 1980’s alive. The narrative is a superb blend of the personal and the historical, each complimenting the other. There’s a great sequence in which she describes a multitude of women across 1950’s London waking up and preparing them-selves for a day’s work. These women represent the vanguard of working women who weren’t going to waste the gender gains of WWII.

Hazzard’s pose is dazzling, sophisticated and beautiful, allowing a special kind of engagement between the reader and the narrative to develop. At times I felt enraptured by her writing and as the novel unfolded the strength and subtlety of the plot became readily apparent. Hazzard also drops a few strong hints about how the novel ends early on and if you pay attention you will understand the ending, otherwise you may be in for a re-read.

Hazzard’s characters have a certain cold complexity, particularly Caroline, who maneuvers through her relationships with a subtle cold detachment. Caroline’s sister, Grace, mostly serves to underline the gender trap of domesticity, although she does take the lead in a section filled with frustrated romantic yearnings. Her husband, Christian Thrale, represents middle-class public servant small-mindedness, something Hazzard herself was familiar with having worked for the United Nations.

I first read this novel way back in 1994 for a university unit on Australian literature and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of highly literate fiction. My prior reading habits mainly included cult novels and science fiction. Hazzard, with one novel, inspired me to move outside my comfort zone and for that I’m grateful. Recently I read an interview with Hazzard in the Guardian from 2006 and I realized that my conversion was no coincidence. She has this to say about literature:

"The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature. I feel that people are more unhappy, in an unrealised way, for not having these things in their lives: not being able to express something, or to profit from somebody else having expressed it. It can be anything but it's always, if it's supreme, an exaltation."

To me this perfectly sums up just why fiction is just as important, if not more so, than non-fiction when it comes to guiding us through this weird universe we find ourselves in. Read The Transit of Venus and you’ll find out just why.

No Certainty Attached: Steve Kilbey and the Church – Robert Dean Lurie (2009)

No Certainty Attached is written by long time fan musician and writer Robert Dean Lurie, who in 1990 at the tender age of 16 saw The Church live on a tour of the U.S. Thirteen years later Lurie contacted Kilbey to ask if he’d be involved with this biography and to Lurie’s surprise he said yes. Fittingly the biography begins with some words from Steve Kilbey himself:

Lurie attempts to come to some kinda understanding of my paradox. That is, I can be so nice, or I can be not so nice and hardly anything in the middle. And it’s funny that Lurie puts the boot in at the end and he reckons that the fambly manne (sic) thing is an act, and my everyman pose is faux, and really I’m the same old prick, and Rob, you’ve hit the nail on the head, actually…

As a long time fan of both The Church and Kilbey’s solo music, the question of whether Steve Kilbey is the same old prick is something I do not particularly care about (as interesting as that is). For me the music is the main consideration and I consider The Church to be one of greatest Australian bands of any era. What the above quote reveals is that No Certainty Attached is not one of those sycophantic and superficial biographies. The fact that Kilbey’s ego is not pandered to and that Lurie himself is part of the story makes No Certainty Attached one of the most enjoyable music biographies I’ve read for a long time.

It’s easy to warm to Lurie, his writing style is unpretentiously affable and over the course of the book his relationship with Kilbey and The Church progresses to the level of friendship. Lurie’s life is very much tied up with Kilbey in terms of being a source of inspiration and ongoing fascination. Lurie recounts his first meeting with Kilbey in 1998 as a support for a solo gig, a meeting that provided him both disillusionment and a certain level of fulfillment. The book contains several interludes in which Lurie ponders the ambiguous boundaries between fandom and his burgeoning relationship with Kilbey. Bravely Lurie recounts how during one of their interviews for the book Kilbey openly tests him for evidence of sycophancy; a test that Lurie fails, much to Kilbey’s displeasure. But Lurie later admits that it taught him a valuable lesson.

Although Lurie’s presence in the book is welcome, it’s Kilbey’s story and the history of the band that makes the book an essential read for Kilbey/Church fans. There’s the usual childhood background, with Kilbey emigrating with his parents from the UK in 1957, eventually settling in Canberra. Steve Kilbey the child was a Doctor Who fan and as Lurie notes was, for better or worse, a smaller version of his adult self. Kilbey became a reluctant teenager, recalling that he was disappointed when he realized that his childhood had ended. Lurie notes that as a teenager Kilbey dated a girl that he was attracted to because she looked like Roger Waters circa the 1971 Meddle album. Hilariously he couldn’t understand why this didn’t go down well. Recollections like these give the biography a welcome level of charm and warmth.

Steve Kilbey's girlfriend in high school

The tale of how The Church came together as a band is a fascinating one. Lurie does a fine job recounting the history of The Church, but one of the best things about the book was that I found out about Kilbey’s many obscure side projects that ran parallel with both the Church and his solo career. It’s possible I could be spending a lot of money online searching out these records. Kilbey’s career is like a labyrinth with many rooms containing obscure treasures.

No Certainty Attached also contains a few revelations; including that incredulously the first lineup of the band included a guy who bullied Kilbey in high school – Nick Ward. Lurie’s interviews with Ward reveal that twenty or so years later he probably would still be bullying Kilbey had he stayed in the band. What is it about drummers? I was also amazed to learn that Kilbey endured a ten-year heroin addiction, which began post Gold Afternoon Fix (1990) - naughty Steve, but I’m glad he survived to tell the tale.

Lurie’s serpentine tale of strife, inspiration, failure and musical brilliance ends in 2006, where again he meets with Kilbey on tour. The meeting is friendly and you can detect that fambly man vibe between them. At the end of the book Kilbey has the final word in a hilarious stream of consciousness via his blog in which he refers to Lurie as having been “…some seriously uptight fanboy” and how he divested himself of that and wrote “a good book”. Kilbey is correct and Lurie should update it soon as The Church released one of their best albums in 2009 (Untitled #23) and are still touring to this day. I advise Church fans to read this book, but no doubt many have already. Also check out Kilbey's interesting blog...

A Time to Read - a Time to Write

January has passed by in a heat haze of demand and grind, so much so that I’ve barely had any time to write either fiction or reviews. If time were a book the January chapter would have to be speed read because reality is just so demanding. As Damon Albarn once noted - modern life is rubbish.

Luckily enough moments to read still present themselves on the train and at work-time lunch. Recently I’ve read No Certainty Attached - a fine Steve Kilbey biography; Shirley Hazzard’s highly literate The Transit of Venus and I’m one hundred pages from finishing Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is like being caught in a medieval mudslide. My thoughts about these books will emerge eventually.

Meanwhile I’m having nearly a week off work to go south of Perth to rest and relax by the beach. I’m taking with me Haruki Murakami’s last book - 1Q84. I’m finally in the mood to read his book after having bought the hardback edition over a year ago. It’s going to be great to reconnect with Murakami. About five years ago I had become quite jaded with the books I was reading. Fortunately I stumbled across his novel Dance Dance Dance at my library and it totally reinvigorated my reading experience.

So Murakami, I’ll be immersed in your weird world again and at night I’ll dream of being trapped in a library labyrinth whilst library patrons pursue me asking unanswerable reference questions, their mouths leaking words that pool on the floor until I’m swimming in them. Well, hopefully I will not have that dream again; instead I’d like to dream about books and wine… 

How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe – Charles Yu (2010)

I’m a total sucker for time travel stories, with their wild narrative possibilities that allow for glimpses of the future, or to meddle with the past, producing paradoxes that can bend your mind. Charles Yu’s tale about a time machine repairman, a meta-man called Charles Yu, promised just the kind of time brain-bending thrill I needed. But a curious thing happened – I didn’t connect with the book at all and found the plot to be pedestrian compared to other great time travel related novels, such as Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (1990) and Greg Bear’s Eon (1991).

How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe’s protagonist is a bit of a loser who has escaped his problems by hiding out in his time machine with a pet dog who doesn’t really exist and a computer with a female persona called Tammy. Unfortunately most of the narrative is centered around Yu’s family, most notably his father who toils for years to create the world’s first time machine by working on the theory that human psychology is the key to time travel. Yu goes on to get himself in a spot of bother with a time paradox and has to work out a way around it. What could be intriguing stuff is unfortunately let down by the subdued loser tone and Yu’s endless ruminations about his relationship with his parents. Charles Yu, the protagonist, not the author, is not an engaging character and the novel also suffers from sluggish forward momentum.

I could go on to further criticize the book’s shortcomings, but instead I’ll talk about how being dissatisfied with this novel made me think about the nature of writing and criticism. This is Charles Yu’s debut novel and as someone who is trying to write fiction I know that it’s no mean feat to sit down and put in the hours to actually write a decent story. Yu undoubtedly put a great deal of hard work into this novel and Corvus also believed that it was good enough to be published. But then someone like me reads it and finds it wanting. Every reader is a critic, whether they write about it or not, but how can we be sure of our critical acumen? With any work of art there exists an objective criteria that can act as a critical roadmap for judging its worth. In the case of literature it is not enough to merely state that the book did not engage or that you simply didn’t like it, you need to be sure objectively as to why the book falls short; that your criticisms are not wholly given over to the subjective whims of your tastes. This is why a book like Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is considered the greatest novel ever written despite the fact most people do not actually enjoy reading it (I’ve met a few who have, but not many).

I am actually comfortable with my conclusion that How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe is flawed due to objective reasons rather than subjective distaste. But there is still a nagging doubt, enough to stop me from giving it a rating. Looking around on the net I found that reader’s reactions ranged from one star reviews right up to five star reviews with raves about the novel’s originality. Did I miss the point of the novel entirely? Was the narrative so clever that all I could notice was some trivial shortcomings that are perhaps commonplace in an author’s debut novel? Did I miss key clues that could have led to an understanding of a complex hidden subplot? This has also made me rethink the plot and wonder if the book is a clever analogy for an individual’s journey through life and therefore space/time? A journey filled with regrets and what ifs that define our psychological landscape.

Perhaps, Charles Yu, I should read your novel again. Perhaps this is the very point of the novel, after all the eponymous protagonist is stuck in a time loop, reading a book that came from the future, a book that Yu is actually writing as he is reading it. A book called How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe. Confused? So am I. Read the book yourself and let me know what you think.

Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis – Deborah Hayden (2003)

Before the antibiotic era syphilis was one of the most feared diseases on the planet. Now of course a dose of penicillin is enough to cure an infection. Yet as the author notes, syphilis still persists even though it has not become resistant to antibiotics, although the worst it can do is rarely seen in the modern age. After reading this book I’m grateful to be living in the antibiotic era (the right side of 1945). Pox tells the story of many famous men and women who suffered from syphilis and the mercury ‘cures’ that were almost worse than the disease itself. The blurb on the dust jacket also promised to reveal the extent of syphilis’s influence on art, achievement and thought since the fifteenth century, something that influenced my decision to read the book.

                                                                                                                                                   

It’s easy to see syphilis as the New World’s ultimate revenge for its brutal colonization by European powers. The first major historical figure examined is Christopher Columbus, who was almost certainly one of the first syphilitic Europeans. Europeans introduced a multitude of new diseases into the native populations of the New World, but the one they brought back with them would curse Europe for centuries to come. When Columbus and his men sailed back into Spain in 1493 the syphilis plague began soon after, with the first major outbreak in Naples in 1495.

The intriguing case of Columbus and his men is just the first of many. In chronological order the supposed syphilitic lives of such historical figures as Beethoven, Schubert, Abraham Lincoln, Vincent van Gogh, Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Adolf Hitler are examined. It makes for a disturbing yet fascinating read.

Hayden is a quality writer, described as an “independent scholar” on the inside of the dust jacket; she manages to avoid the academic solipsism that can ruin some non-fiction. The short introductionary piece called Cactus Flower – Portrait of a Syphilitic, creatively reveals what it would have been like before the anti-biotic era to contract syphilis – the horror, the desperation, the futile attempts to find a cure and the crippling need for secrecy. During the course of the book the nefarious power of the disease is revealed; the initial infection, the often long secondary phase in which syphilis mimics many other diseases and finally the tertiary phase of euphoria and insanity. It’s the last phase that elicits the most fascination and makes you wonder about what kind of symbiotic relationship the spirochete has had with these important historical figures.

Ludwig van Beethoven is a fascinating case. Although is it not absolutely certain that he had syphilis, the evidence is strong. His deafness, rages, cardiac arrhythmias (something he apparently set to music – piano sonata opus 81a les adieux) and general ill health could all be attributed to syphilis. Hayden notes that Beethoven was often seen “wildly stomping” around the streets of Vienna during the last years of his life with hair flying and looking like a tramp – behavior that can be attributed to tertiary syphilis.

Less certain though, is the matter of Beethoven’s musical genius. Could his creative powers be ascribed in part to the influence of the syphilitic spirochete? The same question can be asked about van Gough’s intense paintings. What about Oscar Wilde’s beautiful writing and mordant wit, or James Joyce’s groundbreaking prose? Initially Pox does seem to promise answers, but in fact Hayden skirts around trying to establish such a premise and mainly concentrates on establishing whether these individuals did in fact have syphilis. Pox is basically an academic retrospective detective story featuring some of history’s most influential characters. It’s fascinating stuff, but not as controversial as it initially promises to be. However it doesn’t take much consideration to come to the conclusion that if Hayden had attempted to establish that some of history’s greatest creative minds had owed their inspiration to the syphilis spirochete, then she would have left herself open to severe criticism.

Hayden ends her gallery of syphilitics with Adolf Hitler, which ironically makes the question of syphilis’s influence more pressing. Hayden reveals Hitler as having all the hallmarks of syphilis and examines the theory that a Jewish prostitute possibly infected Hitler when he was a young man. The evidence Hayden presents is certainly compelling. What does this mean regarding how we think about the Holocaust and WWII itself? Would the holocaust had of eventuated if Hitler had not made a fateful visit to a prostitute? If antibiotics had been invented just a few decades earlier would the worst of WWII have been avoided? Of course it’s far more complex than that, but overall Hayden leaves the reader with much to consider, including a new macabre respect for syphilis and its almost symbiotic relationship with those it infects.

White Noise – Don DeLillo (1985)

Was it a coincidence that I had to abandon reading Pox, a book about syphilis and how it influenced certain historical figures, at the chapter about Hitler so I could begin White Noise in time for my book club? Most likely, but somehow I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was significant that White Noise’s protagonist - Jack Gadney, happened to be a professor of Hitler studies. It was also just the kind of trivial coincidence that is elevated to profound significance throughout the novel. Jack and his academic colleague - Murray, would have been suitably impressed and pondered its meaning over many paragraphs.

DeLillo is considered to be a significant postmodern novelist, and White Noise is his most postmodern novel. The book touches on almost every significant postmodern concept available to literature and this is undoubtedly the key to understanding the novel. White Noise utilizes meta concepts, hyperreality, irony, parody, deconstruction, media saturation, cultural fragmentation and the nefarious influence of high capitalism on culture. The novel could also very well be a parody of postmodernism itself (I strongly suspect that this is the case). White Noise is also an extremely funny book and perhaps a bit too clever for its own good, which in this case is a good thing. Perhaps it is pretentious, but personally I love a good dose of pretension.

The Gadney clan sits at the centre of the narrative, a fragmented family of children from three or more different marriages. The children are, for much of the time, more adult than Jack and his blonde bombshell wife - Babette. Their son - Heinrich, is a fast-talking deconstructionalist who argues with Jack about whether the rain outside the car actually exists, particularly if the radio has stated that it wasn’t going to rain. DeLillo uses the Gladney family as a means to explore both the decline of the traditional family unit and the lack of certainty that comes with it. Jack Gladney neurotically searches for meaning in a modern world in which meaning is constantly shifting.

In the first of three titled sections - Waves and Radiation, Jack discovers that Babette is secretly taking a mysterious drug. Both Jack and Babette also suffer from a profound fear of death. The adult Gadneys are obsessed with death and the many new ways of dying that the modern world has manifested all around them. They argue over who will not cope the most if the other dies, but meanwhile they take great pleasure in watching disaster footage on television, totally divorced from the reality of what they are witnessing.

Hyperreality, in which simulations of reality are mistaken for the real thing, is a concept that dominates White Noise. Babette reads absurd pulp magazine articles to the blind and no one questions their validity. In the second section - The Air-Born Toxic Event, the disaster management organisation called SIMUVAC regards the real disaster merely as good preparation for the future simulations they plan. When they do carry out a successful disaster simulation that features noxious gas, there is an actual noxious gas cloud the very next day, but no one responds because it doesn’t seem real.

The dubious truths presented by the media also feature prominently, with Babette’s addiction to talkback radio and the frequent non-sequitur interactions from the TV that masquerade as mystical messages.  Murray only seems to talk in theories, deconstructing the world whilst also negating it with his hyperreal academic argot. Murray is also obsessed with the plain packaging isle at the supermarket, which are hyperreal versions of ‘real’ food. In many ways Murray is the most significant character in White Noise – he is a bullshit artist and genuine at the same time, like a personification of postmodernism.

Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of White Noise is the parody of academia. Jack is the professor of Hitler studies, but can’t speak German. Murray is trying to establish himself as professor of Elvis studies. The meaning of “Hitler’s achievements” (as Jack un-ironically states) is subverted into meaningless pop academia in a superb scene in which Jack trades off comparisons between the two figures with Murray in a lecture that ends with the two being mobbed by the students, as if they themselves were rock stars. Jack’s fellow academics also argue frequently about trivial cultural experiences and act like petulant teenagers, rather than serious academics.

There is so much crammed into this amazing book that a lengthy essay is needed just to begin to address its significance. DeLillo playfully parodies academia, but at the same time he wrote the perfect book to be studied by English Literature students. This is how I first came to read White Noise and now having read it for the third time I remain just as impressed. If you decide to read White Noise you’ll find out what Dylar is, why Jack and Babette covert baby Wilder’s company, the significance of atheist nuns and why it’s always a good idea to have a full tank of fuel in the car in case of air-born toxic events. Out of all the DeLillo novels I’ve read, White Noise is his most fully realized. If you read just one DeLillo novel, make it this one.

The City and the City – China Mieville (2009)

China Mieville’s books have intrigued me for a long time. Not only does he have a cool name but he’s also won the Arthur C Clarke Award three times, a list that includes The City and the City. The novel also won the Hugo Award in 2010 (actually sharing the award with Bacigulup’s The Windup Girl). Mieville is also part of the literary movement dubbed the New Weird  - writers who blend horror, science fiction, fantasy and the surreal. He’s also recently had some interesting things to say about the future of the novel and I found myself agreeing with his insights, in particular his notion that novelists should be paid a wage rather than royalties.

Mieville has stated that he aims to write a novel in every genre. With The City and the City his genre of choice is the crime novel with noir elements. True to the New Weird tag the novel is not a straight crime novel, but falls somewhere between crime and science fiction. At the heart of the narrative is the brilliant idea of two separate cities existing in the same geographical space, but estranged from each other to the extent that their citizens are forbidden to interact. It’s a great idea that Mieville riffs on throughout the novel, but it ends up being both a strength and a weakness. The detail involved in making the premise of two city-states living side by side in isolation believable comes at a cost, when at the half way point A.S Byatt’s notion of narrative greed begins to creep in. Whilst the sometimes slow narrative pacing is certainly a flaw, it is thankfully a minor one.

Written in the first person, Mieville’s economical writing suits this reinvention of the crime novel. Mieville takes the tropes of the crime novel and runs with them gleefully. The novel opens with the description of a crime scene in which a dead body has been found. The no nonsense protagonist – Borlu, gets called “boss” by Corwi, his slightly naive but tough underling. The initial crime opens up many unanswered questions and a cover-up ensues. Borlu has to cross the ‘border’ into the foreign city of Ul Qoma to work with Qussim Dhatt, an equally tough and shrewd detective. Mieville takes such clichés and manages to make them new again against the backdrop of the two divided cities somewhere on the edge of Europe.

The citizens of Beszel have to ‘unsee’ the buildings and citizens of Ul Qoma and vice versa. If there is any significant illegal interaction between the two then in steps Breach – an all-powerful presence that exists in the shadows, policing the invisible borders. This unique premise resulted in me practicing ‘unseeing’ buildings and people on the other side of the road as I walked through Subiaco to work. I discovered that what might sound like a far-fetched idea is actually quite easy to do in practice. Actually I suspect that the premise is an analogy for the unseen (avoided at all costs etc) elements of big cities – the homeless and the under-classes that no one wants or cares about. Is The City and the City a novel with a political agenda? Perhaps, but if so then thankfully Mieville does not labor the point.

The mystery at the heart of The City and the City goes deep and should be enough to satisfy most readers, even those who exist on a literary diet of mystery thrillers. In Borlu Mieville has created a convincing protagonist, even though he sometimes flirts with cliché – or is it respectful parody? Either way you still care about what happens to him in the end, giving the book an emotional impact that gives its somewhat outré concepts a very human framework to hang off. I’m sure that Mieville fans will have their own opinions about how to approach his oeuvre, but The City and the City certainly is a fine place to begin if you are, like me, a New Weird novice.