Hope Farm - Peggy Frew - 2016 Stella Prize

On International Women’s Day it is only appropriate that I look at a novel that has been longlisted for the Stella Prize, a Prize for Australian female writers.

I was hoping to get to as many of the twelve longlisted novels before the shortlist announcement this Thursday 10 March 2016, however it looks as though I will only get to four of the longlist. Jen Craig’s “Panthers & the Museum of Fire”,  “Six Bedrooms” by Tegan Bennett Daylight  and Charlotte Wood’s “The Natural Way ofThings”. With the Man Booker International Prize announcing their longlist on 10 March 2016, and being a member of the Shadow Jury for that award, I am tipping I’ll be a tad busy reading international literature over the coming months, however there is always a chance that the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize contains a number of works I have already read and I may have more spare time to read Australian literature than I had planned, I know…I’m kidding myself, the last few years I have read only one or two of the longlist so have at least ten books to get through over a month!!!

Peggy Frew’s “Hope Farm” opens with an epigram by Margaret Atwood; “You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.” (from Cat’s Eye) – will memory will be the theme here? A short section then follows a short dreamlike sequence, a wish for our narrator to return to Hope Farm before the main novel commences, an opening section titled “Before”, it is imperative you understand, the epicentre here is Hope Farm, what comes before that is simply ‘before’, this novel is a hodgepodge of memories:

It’s hard to remember much from before Hope. We lived in so many places – and in my memory they’ve merged to form a kind of hazy, overlapping backdrop. Certain details leap briefly to catch the light: a kitchen where I climbed into a cupboard and watched a woman’s feet shuffle back and forth as she cooked the hem of her orange robe lapping; the chain-link fence of a school yard, cool under hooked fingers and tasting, when I put my tongue to it, of tears; a dog with new puppies under a verandah, lifting her head to growl when we came squirming in on our elbows, me and a girl whose name is now lost but whose pierced ears I recall perfectly – the wonder of those gold circlets entering the downy, padded lobes. None of these details are anchored though – these is no sequence, no scaffold on which to hang them.

Once our narrator, thirteen-year-old Silver gets to Hope Farm in Victoria from an ashram in Brisbane, with her mother Ishtar, it is winter and we see the failed attempts of the residents at self-sufficiency. Doped out, on the dole (welfare) or working meaningless fruit picking jobs and living on a dilapidated farm:

So the crops had failed, the goats were gone, the compost was rotten, but still they stayed, these people. I suppose they had nowhere better to go. It was the eighties – they were a dying breed. And they were tired; their ideals had seized up and grown heavy somehow, and they didn’t know how to put them down. That’s the only explanation I can come up with now. At the time, of course, I gave it no thought. They were just there, they did what they did – or didn’t – and we were there as well, and I would simply, like always, have to put up with it.

The novel is broken into small sections with every so often a childlike diary/memoir appearing, highlighted by a different font, and it is the voice of a young pregnant girl, whose voice is this?

Silver lives through the town stigma attached to being a “hippy” child, the branding of being dirty, crawling with parasites, worms, lice, “running wild no doubt”. As each page unfolds we have a slow layering of experiences through the eyes of an impressionable child, and how these ‘snippets” of experience and memories mould and shape the adult our narrator is today.

A novel steeped in memory, the unreliability of such, a life made of fragments, the voice of an unreliable narrator, of course a character or voice common throughout literature, in this case this is a prominent feature, skilfully woven throughout to ensure the reader is always questioning the validity of the story instead of simply falling into the narration. This is a well-crafted feature throughout this book:

Or is this only how I remember her? Perhaps she did turn, did set down the peeler and come and site by me at the table, to put her arm around me, to lean in close so her warmth filled my breaths, asking me a question and then waiting for the answer. I often wonder if I have done her a disservice in the way I recall her, in what I have managed to haul from the murk and lay out under the harsh beans of examination and analysis. But I am at the mercy of memory. All I can do is hang on, attend to what I’m supplied with, squint and puzzle over it.

Split into “before’ and “after”, containing the full breadth of the seasons, this is a novel exposing two sides to every story, we have the simple uneducated diary narration of the young innocent interrupting the reflective prose of a grown woman looking back at her childhood, reflecting on her upbringing on a self-sufficient “hippy commune” and wondering at all of the events that have moulded her into the woman she is today.

Early on we are privy to a mysterious event that would shape our narrator, that would “invoke all of those ghosts” and this hook, although easily identified, is a mystery that you need to decipher yourself. A well-crafted, readable and enjoyable novel about family relationships, memory, development of character, blended with a number of tragic stories that come bubbling to the surface. A worthy contender for the shortlist announcement later this week.

Six Bedrooms - Tegan Bennett Daylight - 2016 Stella Prize

Earlier in the week I read a great blog post at “The Writes of Woman” about reviewing books and whether or not you should write negative reviews. The post, plus the review of “Viral” by Helen Fitzgerald can be viewed here. 

Personally I’ve been struggling with how to write a review of Tegan Bennett Daylight’s “Six Bedrooms”. As I would like to read and review as many entrants on the 2016 Stella Prize Longlist, simply ignoring this collection of short stories is not an ideal approach, so my thoughts follow, I’m sure there are plenty of people who will disagree with my views, and that’s fine by me, I’m simply following Naomi’s lead here and “registering my own bias”.

As long term visitors to this blog would know, I’m not a huge fan of “coming of age” fiction, and it takes a pretty special approach to these tales of moving toward adulthood for me to be moved enough to write a glowing review. So first off, a book that is described, on the back cover, thus; “Tegan Bennett Daylight’s powerful collection captures the dangerous, tilting terrain of becoming an adult”, this possibly put me in a certain negative frame of mind before I’d read a page. And when I open this collection of ten short stories….the font is very large, the spacing even larger…I couldn’t help being reminded of Jen Craig’s quote in the another Stella Prize longlisted work, “Panthers and the Museum of Fire”

Every time I pass a bookshop that has the latest releases and the latest promotions of fiction in the window, I am never curious about anything that lies inside the pages whose thick white tongues have been spread just a little so that it is plain for all to see that the type has been spaced too much and the book made thicker and heavier than it might have been, and certainly more than what the book – as it appears to me – has necessarily warranted. All the new novels that are published these days are thicker and heavier that the novels themselves would usually warrant. Each of them is thicker and heavier, by virtue of the fact that the pages are thicker than they should have been and the type spaced further apart than it should have been and the cover made thicker than it should have been in the mistaken belief that the worth of a novel is always only equivalent to its thickness and weight and that the more of it you have when you buy it, the more likely you have bought something worthwhile or at least worth the excessive thickness and heaviness that the publisher has made of it.

Again, I’m already in a negative frame of mind and I’ve yet to read a word….

The collection of ten short stories opens with “Like A Virgin”, named after the Madonna hit of the mid 1980’s, it is a story of a teenager stealing her alcoholic mum’s tequila, going to a party with her friend, her friend getting drunk and the later consequences. “Other animals” a tale of high school friends, discussing boyfriends, the narrator’s ‘friend’ ends up going out with our story teller’s brother.

I hated Judy’s first boyfriend, as expected. He was shaped like a sweet potato. His clothes were exactly wrong. Judy had arranged for us to meet him at Circular Quay one Saturday morning, so that the three of us could go to the movies. He was waiting for us when we got off the ferry. He wore a t-shirt that said I love Brisbane, loose over his narrow shoulders, clinging around his fleshy waist. He stepped forward when he saw us and produced from behind his back a bunch of yellow flowers, six or seven of them, wound in cellophane. I got out of the way so no one would think he was giving them to me.

That’s the opening paragraph of the story “Firebugs”. The whole collection is in this style, stilted, factual, bare, not offensive but also not gripping enough to endear you to any of the characters. A collection surely aimed at the “young adult” audience, and I definitely don’t fall into that category.

In “Trouble” our narrator and her sister move to London, a story of boyfriends, bands and beer.

We’d been told that it would rain often in London, but I hadn’t thought about the kind of rain it would be. I was used to rain or no rain: a tropical torrent that swept up out of nowhere, or days of incessant sunshine that crisped the parks and made the pavements burn your bare feet. In London it just rained, greyly, endlessly, like a weepy friend, always sorry for herself. I bought umbrellas but I was always forgetting them on the tube and having to walk home with my head down, my dyed hair leaking red down my neck.

Of all the stories I found “They Fuck You Up” the most potent of all, the teenage angst, the hatred of parents, the need for independence and the boyfriend forcing his own views, “moulding” his girlfriend to take part in his own independent fantasy life, all joining to a coherent coming of age story.

The title story, “Six Bedrooms” is the tale of living in a shared house, the need to be accepted, the pandering to other housemates, the relationships and although our first person narrator “had read…everything that Helen Garner had written, over and over again” to me the social order, the chaos, and the behaviours of Garner’s “Monkey Grip” is a far superior piece of fiction. Garner’s novel also taking place in a shared house, with musicians, single mothers, actors. Tegan Bennett Daylight’s story throws in the Sydney Mardi Gras instead of the bohemian Melbourne art/music scene, to me it just doesn’t click.

As mentioned before these stories are not at all poorly written, they are not at all offensive, however personally they seem to lack any real punch, they carry all the hallmarks (plot, character, conflict, setting, style, theme – Google “key elements to a short story” and these all show up), but do they add to the genre? Personally I don’t think so. A collection I’ll surely forget I’ve ever read. Personally one to not make the shortlist that will be announced on 10 March 2016.

The Natural Way of Things - Charlotte Wood - Victorian Premier's Literary Award (Fiction) & Stella Prize 2016

In 2010 and 2011 the Melbourne media was filled with stories about a “St Kilda Schoolgirl”, a branding courtesy of the news reporters based on the seventeen-year-old having a consensual sexual relationship with the Australian Rules football player, Sam Gilbert from the St Kilda Football club. The media then had an absolute frenzy over her later sexual “relationship” with 47-year-old football player agent Ricky Nixon and the controversy has continued in recent times with the girl in question failing in her court attempts to stop the release of Nixon’s biography.

At the same time the CEO of one of Australia’s largest retailers, David Jones, resigned in the wake of a sexual harassment complaint from a staff member from their marketing department. He walked away with close to a $2 million payout and his statement to the media said:

"At two recent company functions I behaved in a manner unbecoming of the high standard expected of a chief executive officer to a female staff member.

"As a result of this conduct I have offered my resignation to the David Jones board and we have agreed on the mutual termination of my employment with the company, effective immediately.

"As a chief executive officer and as a person I have a responsibility to many, and today I formally acknowledge that I have committed serious errors of judgment and have inexcusably let down the female staff member. I have also let down my partner, my family, all my staff, the board and our shareholders. I apologise to everyone I have let down.

"In resigning immediately it is my hope that I will minimise the impact of my errors of judgment on all and on David Jones, a company I have been proud to be employed by for 13 years and have had the honour of leading for the last 7 years.

"I would like to thank my colleagues for their support during my time with the company. I am very sorry to be leaving in these circumstances and wish all involved with David Jones continued success.

"My partner and I will be overseas for the foreseeable future."

These are just two examples of the media reports from Australia and I am sure there would be a plethora of similar reports throughout the western world.

But what has that got to do with reviewing books? Recently shortlisted for the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, Charlotte Wood’s “The Natural Way of Things” is an allegorical tale that delves deep into the world of sexual misconduct, predator behaviour and the preconceived notions of the male offenders walking away from their actions whilst the women are left to deal with their demons.

Our novel has two protagonists, Verla and Yolanda, who suddenly wake, after being drugged, in a facility where they are forced to wear course modest clothing, have their heads shaved, are marched mercilessly for miles, fed poor rations, drink bore water and sleep in run-down shearer’s cottages, all without talking. What has happened to them? What is their link (there are a number of other girls in the same predicament)? Why are they there? Slowly we leave of each of their pasts, and intern who had an affair with a high ranking politician, a high profile sex case with footballers, is this what links them?

Before dawn she wakes again with the birds. Kookaburras, cockatoos, somewhere far off. Her back aches, she needs desperately to piss. Light seams the door and the window slot, cracks between the iron panels, softly at first, then in sharp bright lines. The room…it is not a room – what is it? A shed, a stall of animals. A kennel with a dirty wooden floor and corrugated-iron walls battened with wood. A kennel bog enough to stand up in, to contain a single iron-framed bed.

This novel is not a comfortable read, as it forces you to confront the everyday preconceptions, bias, humiliation of young women being forced to confront who they are?

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they ‘disappeared’, ‘were lost’? Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.

As I would rather not contain spoilers in my reviews I'll have to let you read this on your own to know the fate of the girls trapped in remote Australia, with three guards, who also seem to be trapped. This is not the usual style of novel that I read, nor review on my blog, however as it was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2016, I borrowed a copy from my local library and although unlike my usual “eclectic” reads it is a worthwhile novel to read. It raises a number of pertinent points about female sexuality, about male predatory behaviour, about social norms, language. It brought to mind language and the common usage of phrases such as “domestic violence victim”, “sexual assault victim”, instead of “he hit her”, “he raped her”, the female being the “victim” instead of the male being the perpetrator.

Reminiscent of Emma Donoghue’s “Room” but with a more hopeless edge, this is a dystopian novel about capture, of being trapped even though you may have escaped, of not being able to find a way out of your own existence, it’s not a case of “where you are” but “who you are”?

As the high profile cases I highlighted in my opening, the men involved in these cases have moved on, and in some cases are making money from their behaviour, whereas the women involved are still harbouring the scars of these men’s behaviour. Put that to an allegorical backdrop and you have Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, a thought provoking and brave novel, one that may not be comfortable to read, but one that would surely elicit a lot of discussion around the book-club tables.