Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“MY BRILLIANT SISTER” by Amy Brown (Scribner, $NZ 37.99); “LAWRENCE OF ARABIA” by Ranulph Fiennes (Michael Joseph, $NZ42 ); “THE VANISHING POINT” by Andrea Hotere (Ultimo Press $NZ38)

            Amy Brown, New Zealander now resident in Melbourne, has published poetry and stories for children over the last decade or so. My Brilliant Sister is her first novel for adults and it is a formidable, complex piece of work. The novel comprises three separate stories about three separate women, but linked with the same themes: how difficult, if not impossible, is it for women to sustain a career, or be creative, if they have to do all the domestic work and raise children? Or conversely, how easily can women sustain friendships (or love) when they are focussed on a career?  This is clearly a feminist novel, often referring to the fact that women usually have to do all the heavy-lifting of cleaning and raising children while their male spouses or partners can simply stand back and pursue their interests. Each of the three women tells her story in the first person.

            Ida (the first third of the novel) is a New Zealander living in Melbourne. She is not married formally, though we are told that she and her man had a jokey “celebration” in Wellington when they decided to live together. They have a four-year-old daughter called Aster. Ida feels thwarted. Her partner is an academic university lecturer who hides himself in his study and absorbs himself in his writing, getting ahead with his career. Ida believes she too could have had an academic career as she did well at university; but she wasn’t awarded scholarships and instead teaches at high-school. Ida has to look after Aster, take her to and from care places, make breakfast, lunch and dinner, do the cleaning… and teach high-school. Like her partner she wants to write, but where is the time? In the background of this story is the Covid pandemic. At high-school Ida gets 17-year-old girls to read the classic Australian novel My Brilliant Career,  published in 1901, written by Stella Miles Franklin [full name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, but published under the name Miles Franklin, as in 1901 it was still believed by some publishers that books would sell better if they appeared under masculine-sounding names]. Stella Miles Franklin was a free-wheeling, unconventional woman who turned down a proposal of marriage, never married, and got on with her writing… under many different pseudonyms.  Struck down with pneumonia, Ida, bed-ridden, reads all she can about Stella Miles Franklin, and learns that Stella had a younger sister, Linda, who married when Stella did not, had a baby and died when she was only 25. Linda lived a conventional life, did all the household chores, but also sometimes showed a desire to produce works of her own. She frequently wrote to Stella. This leads Ada to consider what it would be like for women who have literary or other artistic aspirations but are never able to achieve them… which could be her own fate.        

The second section of the novel is therefore told by Linda Franklin, in rural Australia in the 1890s and very early 1900s, round about the time when Australian women won the franchise. In the first person, Linda writes letters to her older sister or addresses Stella directly in a free-flowing monologue. Linda remembers Stella’s boisterous adolescence, her tendency to dominate Linda, and the way she brushed aside both an offer of marriage and the stories Linda tried to tell when Stella was concocting her own plots. Linda marries, is domesticated and has a child, but there is a tension in her thoughts. She likes her husband, she loves her child (who dies young), but she still feels she has not been given the chance to fully express herself in writing, about which she dreams. Stella Miles Franklin becomes famous when she is only 21 and her My Brilliant Career is first published. For Linda, Stella becomes “my brilliant sister”. She envies her sister and she dislikes the way Stella often belittles as trivia things that are important to Linda. And, of course, Linda dies too young to show what she could have achieved.

While this second section reinforces the theme Amy Brown began with, the third section of My Brilliant Sister is more ambiguous. The time is the [almost] present. Another Stella is a very successful rock star in New Zealand, a singer-songwriter and guitarist who attracts large audiences to her gigs. Her stage name is Stella Miles Franklin. Stella sees no point in marriage.  Stella has fallen in lesbian love with another musician, but apparently her love is not returned. She often leans on her mother for conversation but, at the age of 36, she’s beginning to wonder if her musical days are fading away. Has she reached her peak? She talks with Linda, a friend since schooldays, who is married and has three children; but much as she likes her friend, she knows that is not the life she wants. As a celebrity, she is invited to speak at her old high school but, as she narrates it, what she says is barely coherent. She ends up fantasising about having the double or sister she never had – somebody she could relate closely with.

There are many ideas crammed into this section of the novel, but surely one of them is that having a “brilliant career” does not necessarily mean either happiness or fulfilment. There is always competition. There is always the possibility that focusing on achieving something can make it difficult to foster intimate relationships with others. The achiever can morph into a loner and loneliness will reign. Read as I have read it, this third part of the novel is more dour and depressing even than the experiences of Ada and Linda Franklin… or perhaps Amy Brown is signalling that being truly creative is always a hard road.

Taken as a whole, My Brilliant Sister is a complex and thoughtful account of the relationship of the sexes, as well as the difficulty of finding room for creativity. For this reader at any rate, the most persuasive of the novel’s three sections is the opening one, the one that sounds most authentic. Brown charts carefully, moment by moment, the small things that stack up, forcing Ida to see herself as almost trapped and unable to fulfil herself. I can’t help wondering if it is at least in part based on the author’s own experience. [The very unfashionable three-letter name Ida might chime with the author’s three-letter name Amy.] The second section, set in the New South Wales of the 1890s, is almost as persuasive. Brown has certainly done her research. The social classes of the time, the poverty that the Franklin family fall into when they lose their farm, the sharp difference between Linda’s home experience and Stella’s boarding-school experience, the snobbery of some of the horsey-riding clan – it is all readable and all real. I would only fault (me being a nit-picking person) a few moments when narrating Linda, recalling what she said as a ten-year-old, seems to use a vocabulary far beyond her age.

This is an important novel, though I would understand if some readers saw it as very depressing.

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It’s been calculated that about 300 books concerning Thomas Edward Lawrence “of Arabia” have been published, and they keep coming. Readers of this blog may be aware that some time back I wrote a detailed critique of Lawrence’s autobiography of his years in Arabia, Seven Pillars of Wisdom ,highly praised in its day but now subject of much criticism. And I found much in it to criticise. I also reviewed Richard Aldington’s Lawrence ofArabia – A Biographical Enquiry, published in the 1950s and the first detailed attempt to debunk the Lawrence legend. Aldington was shouted down at the time, but later research has proven that much of what he wrote has turned out to be accurate. The problem was that Aldington tended to be dogmatic and refused to see any good in Lawrence. I could see that, even if Lawrence did not achieve as much as he claimed to have done, there was something extraordinary in a short-sized English officer being able to gain the trust of Arabs and become one of their leaders – especially as Lawrence was only in his twenties at the time. So you can see I’m undecided about Lawrence. He was partly charismatic leader of the Arab tribes and partly self-aggrandising charlatan.

            Ranulph Fiennes’ Lawrence of Arabia is the latest attempt to crack the Lawrence enigma. Fiennes has written many non-fictions, usually polishing up the tales of British heroes like Captain Scott and Shackleton. Fiennes has also done much travelling. The blurb tells me that, according to the Guinness Book of Records, Fiennes is “the world’s greatest living explorer”. Most pertinent, however, is the fact the Fiennes has been a soldier and commander of men in situations of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare. In the 1960s he fought for the Sultan of Omar in putting down the Dhofar Rebellion. This was in a desert country and Fiennes sees himself as having acted very much as Lawrence did in a similar environment.

            In his introduction, Fiennes describes Lawrence’s work in Arabia as “one of the most awe-inspiring stories of all time… a young British officer set the desert on fire and emblazoned his name in the pages of history.” Against this hyperbole, all I can say is “Strewth!” Fiennes identifies himself with Lawrence. Every so often, Fiennes breaks off his narrative of Lawrence of Arabia to interpolate tales of his days in Oman. When he tells the well-known story of Lawrence shooting an Arab to prevent a blood feud, he tells us that he himself knew how unpleasant he felt when he had to shoot a man. When we are told of some successful strategy Lawrence used,  Fiennes tells us of something similar he did. I can see easily how this might annoy some readers.

            Having read other texts about Lawrence, I question at least some of the statements Fiennes makes. He presents the taking of port of Wejh as one of Lawrence’s great triumphs when others have reported that Wejh was taken mainly by the Royal Navy, with Lawrence turning up after most of the action was over. More questionably, Fiennes says that Lawrence knew nothing about the Sykes-Picot agreement – the plan to divide up Arabia between the English and the French - until the very last moment and only then did he become disillusioned with his hope to free the Arabs. The hard fact is that Lawrence was fully aware of this secret pact almost as soon as it was hatched.

            In fairness, though, I have to admit that, despite the interpolations about himself, Fiennes tells a good story and makes the campaigns of Lawrence understandable. As Lawrence told of them in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, they were often confusing and complex. Fiennes turns them into a good yarn. Also, note that he takes on board some of the things that Aldington was abused for noting in the 1950s – among other things that Lawrence was essentially homosexual with a tendency for sadomasochism. Fiennes admits that Lawrence had his flaws, and that his supposed aim to create a unified Arab country never came to fruition. Indeed what Lawrence left behind him was a mess of rival Arab tribes vying for dominance. In the end his achievement was very little. In spite of which, as told by Fiennes, Lawrence of Arabia bounces along with its skirmish scenes, de-railing of trains and other matters of derring-do which will give great pleasure to those who like the genre of outdoor muscular adventure – truthful or otherwise.

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I have to admit that I took some time getting around to reading Andrea Hotere’s The Vanishing Point, which was published last year. My holidays drew me off to other interests.

 The Vanishing Point is centred on a very famous work of art. Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting), painted in Madrid in 1656, has been examined, quarrelled over by experts, admired by art critics, inspired other painters (Picasso et al) and widely loved by the general public more than nearly any other painting except perhaps the Mona Lisa. I admit to standing gazing at it for a long time while visiting the Prado a few years back. It does cast a certain spell. What gets you is the way Velasquez, painting a group of the royal Spanish court, presents them in unexpected places, including himself staring at us from his easel as if he is painting us, the viewers, and not the royal gathering. There is also the unexpected cluster around the little princess, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, with not only two ladies-in-waiting about her, but the two dwarves and the mastiff and more dimly-depicted people behind them. And why are the king (Philip IV) and the queen shown only in a small painting on the far wall… or is it a mirror showing part of what Velasquez is painting? And, at the painting’s vanishing point, who is that man going out the far door?

It is, I believe, the complexity of this work of art and Velasquez’s daring in breaking with tradition that make Las Meninas the masterpiece it is. He defied the standard convention of presenting royalty in stiff, lined-up poses. We admire Las Meninas and ponder over it for purely aesthetic reasons.

            But Andrea Hotere is not really focused on aesthetics. She is focused on a conspiracy. Basic plot: in the late 20^th century two young woman, interested in art, try to unravel the “secret” behind Las Meninas and what is hidden in it.  There is a “curse” hanging over King Philip IV and his offspring, and apparently a scandal involving the king himself … and it transpires that there’s a sinister group, something like the Spanish version of the fabled  “Illuminati”, that tries fanatically to cover things up. Hotere’s narrative moves between 17^th century Spain and late 20^th century London and Spain. And apparently in the 20^th century there are still people trying to eliminate those who get too near to unravelling the hidden codes of Velasquez’s masterwork.

            Let’s make some fair points: Andrea Hotere has done a great deal a research, knows much of the reality of 17^th century Spain, and conveys it to us, usually in the form of conversations between characters to enlighten us... which can sometimes sound artificial. She is also aware that the “curse” that fell upon the whole Hapsburg dynasty was not some supernatural spell or demonic damnation. It was simply genetic. The Hapsburgs were very in-bred, leading among other things to the notorious and unsightly “Hapsburg Jaw”; and the king who followed Philip IV was the pitiful King Carlos who was virtually a drivelling idiot. [Years ago I read on this subject a book called Carlos the Bewitched, which is what the poor fellow was nicknamed at the time.] Yet it is not really this “curse” that is Andrea Hotere’s main interest. She is more concerned with that man going out the door of the “vanishing point” and all he might have done with regard to the scandal involving the king.

            The Vanishing Point is an easy read, though for all the author’s genuine erudition it does seem to be following the likes of The Girl with a Pearl Earing. However, given that Hotere is genuinely very well informed about 17th century Spain, she is miles ahead of the type of unhistorical drivel Dan Brown produced with his The Da Vinci Code.  The Vanishing Point is a great read if you like conspiracy theories.