The Children's Bach - Helen Garner (1984)

 

Rating: Excellent

This is my second read of Helen Garner’s novella, The Children’s Bach, the first time was as part of the Modern Australian Literature unit I completed at university in the mid-nineties. I enjoyed it greatly at the time and on my second read I’ve enjoyed it even more. When I first read it, I was actually, in hindsight, a novice reader when it came to Australian literary fiction, and literary fiction in general. It opened my eyes to the possibilities of a certain kind of literary storytelling, serious, yet playful, told simply, but with mysterious literary mechanisms lurking underneath it all. I was intrigued and impressed by the tale of the Fox family, the married couple Athena and Dexter and their sons, Arthur and Billy, who are living out their lives in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. The novella stayed with me for decades, often coming to mind when I visited Melbourne. The Fox family’s lives are altered by the appearance of Elizabeth, an old university friend of Dexter’s and her much younger sister, Vicki. Both end up being drawn to the Fox’s house, an old run-down weatherboard (my internal image of the house anyway), with cramped rooms and a large disheveled back yard. This then brings the cock-sure rock musician, Philip, who is loosely involved with Elizabeth, into their lives, who provides just the louche distraction Athena needs to break free of the restrictions of domestic life.

Helen Garner, in the inner suburbs

Set in the early eighties, The Children’s Bach is culturally fascinating, both in terms of Garner’s portrayal of inner city Australia and her singular writing style. Garner presents as an Australian writer developing our own literary landscape, particularly when taking into consideration her breakout debut Monkey Grip (1977), which mined a similar, but darker urban milieu. Garner’s style is impressionistic, with characters appearing abruptly and scenes flowing into each other. The novel will perhaps not make sense to readers expecting a linear notion of time and setting (something this critic had a great deal of trouble with, so much so it made me think that he has a limited understanding of narrative), however it’s not that radical, rather it comes across as a more modest and pared back emulation of Patrick White’s high modernistic stylings. The novel is thematically rich, exploring family values vs. the nonconformity of counterculture lifestyles, sexuality and the yearning disaffection of middle-age, mostly played out through Athena’s lust for what lays outside of her established life with the loving, yet overbearing Dexter and their disabled son Billy (who presents as autistic). Of course, music runs all through the novella, with Athena’s attempts at learning to play Bach on a rickety piano a metaphor for attempting to master living one’s life in the face of a complex world. The Children’s Bach is a beautiful, rewarding reading experience and underlines that Helen Garner is rightly celebrated as a talented and important Australian writer who appears as both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, somewhat like the characters she created for The Children’s Bach.

This is Where the Serpent Lives - Daniyal Mueenuddin (2026)

 

Rating: Excellent

Daniyal Mueenuddin is a US born Pakistani author who has managed to produce a brilliant and seriously literary debut novel in This is Where the Serpent Lives. In part based on his own experiences, having moved back to Pakistan from the US to take over the family farm and as an individual who straddles both east and west; This is Where the Serpent Lives encompasses sixty years of Pakistani history (1955-2013) from the point of view of both the wealthy land-owning classes and the servant classes. Told via four interlinking sections, the novel begins in 1955 with ‘The Golden Child’ when the owner of a tea stall, Karim Khan, takes in orphan, Bayazid (mostly known as Yazid). Yazid goes on to be the significant and sympathetic character who provides a link throughout the novel's different sections. Yazid, humble and observant, goes from being a tea stall holder to chief driver for the Atar family, principally Hisham Atar and Shahnaz Atar, important characters who feature in the third and fourth sections. Although only some 343 pages long This is Where the Serpent Lives reads like a Russian epic, both stylistically and thematically. Critics have compared Mueenuddin to Chekhov, particularly due to the author’s vivid realism, unclear narrative resolutions and the complex relations between landowners and servants in feudal rural Pakistan. Simply put, This is Where the Serpent Lives is an extraordinary novel, full of complex characters and fascinating historical and cultural detail; one could say that it’s lapidary in its attention to detail. 

Spanning decades of Pakistani history during the post-war period when modernisation and Westernisation was making inroads into societies that had long entrenched social hierarchies, Mueenuddin creates a complex dramatisation of societal tensions, ambition, decadence and thwarted social mobility. Once we've been introduced to Yazid and his world, the second section, ‘Muscle’, acts as a scene-setting exploration of class, hierarchy, and engrained corruption via the young sophisticate, Rustom, a character who is thrown into the deep end when he returns from America to take over the family farm (the author has acknowledged the autobiographical nature of this section). This section introduces the Atars, who, along with their young servant, Saqib, then dominates the third and fourth sections, ‘The Clean Release and ‘This is Where the Serpent Lives’, which, as one would imagine, has well developed, but not cliched black and white biblical themes. When the attentive reader takes in the complex interrelationship between the wealthy and amoral Atars and the humble, but underhand Saqib, it is not clear just who is the serpent in question, although this is part of the point. Having never read any works by Pakistani authors, nor read any novels set in Pakistan, This is Where the Serpent Lives was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, especially Mueenuddin’s beautiful and precise prose, which at times was just exquisite in its jewel like clarity. As the novel comes symbolically full circle in its dénouement, one can only admire the novel’s brilliance and hope that Mueenuddin, already in his early sixties, can produce more novels of such a high standard. The book club attendees loved This is Where the Serpent Lives, awarding it high scores; I very nearly gave it a sublime rating, but it’s somewhere between excellent and sublime and would get four and a half if I used a numerical system.