Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

FOUR BOOKS THAT GOT LOST IN THE CONFUSION

 

Very well. I know I’m cheating. The banner of this “Something Old” section says it deals with books four or more years old. But here I am presenting you with four reviews which have never hitherto been published, and all of which deal with books that first appeared in 2018 and 2019. Why am I doing this? Pure egotism, probably. I am a regular reviewer for the New Zealand “Listener”. But there was a hiatus of some months when the “Listener” was not being published, and therefore reviews which had been submitted were not published. Now the books in question are, in journalistic terms, no longer new or topical and cannot be run. That at least is the reason that one of these reviews was never run. The other three, however, got lost because I filed them before I went on an overseas trip for three months, and they were simply never used.

They’re a mixed bunch. I think one of these four books is rather lacking, but the other three are pretty good. See what you think.

 

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“AUTUMN IN VENICE” by Andrea di Robilant (First published 2018)

 

Dedicated fans of Ernest Hemingway consider A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls to be the man’s masterpieces. They quite like The Sun Also Rises and they can stomach the so-so To Have and Have Not. But even the most committed fans see Across the River and Into the Trees as an embarrassment. Hemingway’s last full-length novel reads like a bad parody of his earlier work.

This fact compromises Italian-born American-resident Andrea di Robilant’s Autumn in Venice. Subtitled “Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse”, this entertaining, gossipy and name-dropping book would have us believe that Hemingway was inspired by a young “muse” to resume his writing career, after he had gone nearly ten years without producing a novel. Alas, the novel the young woman inspired was Across the River and Into the Trees, which leads us to ask how great a “muse” she was after all

In 1948 Ernest Hemingway was almost 50 and seemed washed-up as a writer. With his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, he went to Italy to re-visit places he had first known thirty years before, as an ambulance driver in the First World War. But in Venice, the Hemingways fell in with a fashionable, aristocratic bunch of socialites and Ernest met 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich, who was just out of finishing school. The middle-aged man was immediately smitten with the “lovely, seductive, mischievous” Italian kid. A thinly-disguised version of Adriana became one of the main characters in his new novel.

Hemingway knew Adriana on and off for about six years. Unusually for him, their relationship seems to have remained platonic. Despite much gossip, it was basically a little cuddling with exchanges of kittenish letters and bad poetry. She called him “Mr Papa” and he called her “Daughter”. Adriana visited Hemingway in Cuba, and made him happy when he was writing his last good work, the novella The Old Man and the Sea. This may have been her greatest contribution to his literary output. Then she got married, struggled with deep depression, and years later committed suicide, just as Hemingway had done.

            In all this, you can’t help feeling most sympathy for Mary Welsh. She had to put up with her husband’s tantrums and public humiliation of her as she typed up his hand-written drafts and managed his social calendar. Blowhard that he was, Hemingway was never short of self-praise, claiming to his publisher that his dud novel was going to “knock Shakespeare on his ass”. Then there was all the boozing and the occasional brawls.

            Andrea di Robelant seems to understand that Adriana was never the centre of Hemingway’s life. He often shifts attention from her to follow other events. The result is a loose chronicle with many anecdotes of the publishers, journalists, movie-stars and other writers who walked in and out of Hemingway’s social circle. On that level Autumn in Venice is a diverting read.

 

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“LEARNING TO DIE” by Thomas Maloney (First published 2018)

 

Just a few years ago, it was fashionable to say, “30 is the new 21.” There is some truth to this. In western, industrialised societies, more people spend longer over tertiary education before they start a career. People marry later, if they marry at all. Having families is not part of the agenda for most people in their 20s. Result? Only when they’re in their early 30s do many start thinking about taking on long-term commitments. And only then do they consider that life doesn’t go on forever.

Now in his 30s, Thomas Maloney aims his second novel directly at this condition.

All English, all middle-class, all university-educated, Natalie, Dan, Mike, Brenda and James are all in their early 30s and feeling the walls closing in. Natalie’s just had a minor accident and is beginning to think her marriage to Dan lacks zip. She starts re-reading wistfully letters she got from an old boyfriend years before. Dan, a rational and logical particle physicist, is getting a bit bored with his job and is disconcerted by odd twinges and numbness his body is now throwing at him. Brenda is a loner who likes skiing, hiking and the great outdoors, but feels a lack of intimacy with anyone. Her brother Mike has made pots of money in high finance and investments, and is a hedonist regularly scoring one-night stands.  But he’s lost all sense of purpose in what he does. Meanwhile the bohemian James, who deludes himself that he is morally superior to all these materialistic people, is mired in writing a novel, which we know he will never finish.

So five 30-somethings question the validity of their lives, try to re-discover their lost youth, and know things can’t go on this way.

This could be the formula for soap opera or one of those cutesie ensemble movies if Maloney wasn’t such a skilful writer. It takes a little time to get into Learning to Die as, at first, we do not see the connections between these characters and think we are going to hear five discrete stories. Once the connections are made, however, Maloney shows exactly why and how all the characters have reached their current state. Their interaction is credible and the psychological disorientation of each convincing. Okay, there is a little dip towards moralising in the last few pages, but not enough to derail the novel, especially as Maloney is a master of style. The farewell soliloquy of one character, who is dying, is one of the most eloquent valedictories I’ve read.

There is a calm sanity and a broad sense of compassion to this novel. It is significant that each chapter is headed with a quotation from the essays of the French Renaissance sage Michel de Montaigne, who was Mr Calm Rationality himself. The Montaigne epigraph to Chapter 25 is a stunner: “If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will give you full and adequate instruction on the spot.” Quite.

 

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“IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY” by Guy Gunaratne (First published 2018)

            Novels are not government social policy. They are not required to present solutions to the social problems they examine. But by dramatising such problems, they can enlighten us. This is the way of Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City.

A Londoner of Sri Lankan parentage, Gunaratne looks closely at the lives of young men who are the children of recent immigrants, living on a North London council estate. Nigerians, Ghanaians, Bengalis, South Indians, East Europeans, Pakistanis, Irish, West Indians and others get on well enough. Sure, there are some tribal tensions, but kids from all these backgrounds generally tolerate one another’s cultural peculiarities and match one another at football in the square between the estate’s bleak high-rise apartment blocks. Football is a universal language.

Then a radicalised Muslim kid kills an off-duty soldier and it seems game on for a major race riot.

The novel is told in braided first-person narratives of five people. Three young men are the focus. The Pakistani kid Yusuf has the rawest deal. His instinct is to integrate with his non-Muslim mates, but the Muhajiroun, the local Muslim “decency police”, insist that he submit to a stricter form of Islam. His main friend Selvon is the randy athlete who chases after opportunities for sex, listens to self-improvement tapes and hopes to get ahead in the world. His other friend Ardan is the dreamier type who likes hip-hop and defeats bullies with rap face-offs rather than fights. Gunaratne deliberately doesn’t reveal the ethnicities of Selvon and Ardan until late in the novel.

These kids, as Gunaratne sees them, are not “problems”. Their music, camaraderie and high hopes are celebrated. By their very language you know them, with much of their narration conducted in a local patois replete with keys words such as “truesay”, “ennet”, and “suttan”. But they are in a fraught situation where poverty jostles with prejudice and violence is waiting to break out.

As for the two older narrators, they are Gunaratne’s way of giving the novel a broader historical perspective. Nelson is a West Indian old enough to remember the Notting Hill race riots of 1958. Caroline is an Irish woman who fled from the last round of Troubles in Belfast. Both have drawn the conclusion that fanaticism breeds violence, which just breeds more violence. Both are worried about how younger people are going to react to the latest outrage and the growing anti-immigrant chorus.

There is no overt moralising, but it ends somewhere close to Gandhi’s maxim that “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” It does have tragedy but oddly, it’s not depressing. Mainly this is the effect of the language, which is lively, imaginative, filled with the rough and effective imagery that the young can cook up, and making us more aware that at least something good can be emerge from the worst situations.

 

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“DAUGHTER OF BAD TIMES” by Rohan Wilson (First published 2019)

 

From Brave New World to The Handmaid’s Tale, dystopian novels have always worked by taking a current trend and pushing it to its logical, and usually horrible, conclusion.

In his third novel, award-winning Tasmanian novelist Rohan Wilson is clearly worried by three things. They are climate change and the rising of sea levels; the way private corporations are able to run prisons for profit; and the way immigrants and refugees are treated in Australian detention centres on Manus Island and elsewhere. Put these three ingredients together and you have the nightmare of the future, Daughter of Bad Times.

It’s the late 21^st century, about 50 years away. Apart from a few islands with huge sea-walls, the Maldives have been drowned by the ocean, leaving thousands of refugees stateless. An Australian “Migration With Dignity” scheme offers refugees work at the Eaglehawk Migrant Training Centre on Tasmania, which purports to teach migrants “Australian values” and the need for hard work and productivity so that they can win citizenship. In reality, run by the international “Cabey-Yasuda Corrections” corporation, the “centre” is a harsh prison and the migrants are inmates.

One Maldivan inmate, Yamaan Ali Umair, narrates about half the chapters of this novel. The rest are narrated by Rin Sakurai, a Japanese woman who has been adopted by the billionaire American woman who runs the corporation. A little improbably, perhaps, Rin and Yamaan have previously met and have had a brief, blazing affair, which is now on the rocks. She, compromised by her connection to her adoptive mother, wants to reconnect with him. He wants to survive. From very early in the novel, we know that there has been a massive riot and breakout from the “centre” and much of what follows is told in flashback.

            Rohan Wilson holds out some hope for the future. Human rights activists still make protests. The aftermath of the riot (again signalled early in the novel) is a commission of enquiry. In the main, though, this is grim stuff. We have not only the barbarity of the prison itself, but the hard fact that inmates are frequently at odds with one another. The moderation and humanity of Yamaan’s friend Hassan is often shouted down by the radical Islamicism of Yamaan’s cousin Shadi. There are ethnic frictions between Maldivan, Sri Lankan and other refugees. One firebrand Aussie bloke takes a leading part in the riot without fully understanding the different groups he claims to lead.

            As dystopian protest, much of this is convincing, but there are two major problems. When it comes at last, the details of the big riot (taking up about a quarter of the novel) are messy and confused. And the story of Rin, searching in Japan for her biological mother, takes us far from the heart of the novel’s matter. There may be some parallels between Rin’s loss of her original identity, and Yamaan’s loss of his family, but the adventures of Rin blunt the novel’s impact.