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.  

                            THE FICTION OF MICHELLE DE KRETSER, PART ONE

 

            Some months ago, I suffered from one of my periodical literary crises of conscience. Much as I like writing the “Something Old” section of my blog, I wondered if I was leaning too much on books from long ago – not only “classics” from earlier centuries, but books written back in the mid-twentieth century. This had to do with my making myself read, for “Something Old”, books that had hitherto stayed unread on my shelves, many of them fairly old. So I got in touch with a good friend and asked him if he could name some living writers whose work he had read and admired and which might be worth my delving into.  But the treacherous fellow, instead of listing writers he had read, sent me instead a list of three writers he had heard were very good, but whom he hadn’t got around to reading. I went through the list, checking out the credentials of the three nominees, and decided that Michelle de Kretser looked the most interesting.

 

            To introduce you to the novelist if, like me, you knew next to nothing about her before reading her work. Michelle de Kretser was born in 1957 in Sri Lanka, when it was still widely known as Ceylon. Her mother was Sinhalese but her father was of “Burgher” descent, meaning some of his ancestors were early Dutch colonials, hence her Dutch surname de Kretser. Her family migrated to Australia in 1972 when Michelle was 14. She took a degree in French at the University of Melbourne. She went to Paris to study for a Masters degree but did not go into academia. Instead, she worked a number of years as an editor for the Lonely Planet travel guides. Only when she was 42, in 1999, did she produce her first novel The Rose Grower, which gained much attention. Since then she has written five more novels, one novella and a literary biography. Nearly all her novels have been awarded prestigious literary prizes in Australia and elsewhere – The Miles Franklin Award, the ASL Gold Medal, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize etc. She is widely regarded as Australia’s pre-eminent living novelist and she has sometimes been described as a possible Man-Booker Prize winner – but so far she has made it only to the long list.

            Over three weeks I set about reading all her novels, but with one exception. As it happens, her debut novel The Rose Grower is the only one of her novels that is not available from the New Zealand Library service. Apart from knowing that it was widely applauded, all I know of this novel is that it was a kind of fantasy in which a (modern) American lands in revolutionary France. Sorry I can say no more about it. And now for my comments on the five de Kretser novels and one novella that I have read.

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Here is a question that might puzzle some readers. Why is The Hamilton Case (first published in 2003) called The Hamilton Case?  The very title suggests a cosy whodunnit of the Agatha Christie era, and of course this novel is no such thing. Yes, there is a crime when the tea-planter Angus Hamilton is murdered on a lonely jungle path and there is an investigation, trial and judgement. But the actual details of the murder and its outcome occupy at most 50 pages of a novel which runs to about 360 pages. Yet somehow this wretched case of murder has resonance and manages to be referred to, even years after it was thought to be resolved. Somehow it becomes crucial as a touchstone for attitudes of different races, classes and communities in a colonised country.

Hamilton is murdered in the 1930s when the island state, then a British colony, was still known as Ceylon, long before it became Sri-Lanka. Chief protagonist is Stanley Alban Marriott Obeysekere, known to his Ceylonese enemies as “Obey” because he is said to obey, follow too closely and fawn upon British colonial attitudes and laws. His personal initials S.A.M. also spell Sam, by which name he is also often known. Obeysekere narrates, in the first person, the first third of the novel, and we quickly understand what an unreliable narrator he is. He is boastful, self-justifying, a tell-tale sneak when he was a schoolboy, ambitious, toadying to British authority (he goes to Oxford and sends his son there), envious of other people’s success and always admiring British mores and law. Son of an Anglophile family, he becomes a lawyer and revels in being on the side of prosecution in criminal trials. He hopes to become a judge.  But is he really accepted by the British overlords? Probably not. Far from being a whodunnit, the novel really charts the fortunes of Obeysekere’s family as Ceylon goes through the 1930s, the war years, independence in 1948, and by 1956 a growing Sinhalese (Buddhist) majority nationalism at odds with the large Tamil (Hindu) minority. Indeed the dominant Sinhalese political party encourages Sinhalese supremacism.

In the third-person narrative of the rest of the novel, we are shown the disintegration of Obeysekere’s family – there are long and detailed accounts of his mother Maud, once the belle of the ball, now a desiccated and often deluded old woman; the tragedy that befalls his marriage; the deep background to his own childhood; the loss of one of his siblings when he was a boy; and much later the tragically unsuccessful marriage of his sister Claudia when she wed an old classmate of Obeysekere, Donald Jayasinghe, commonly known as Jaya.

On a certain level, this is a novel about de-colonisation in the real sense of that term, as Ceylon / Sri Lanka moves towards being a sovereign state. As it does so, the status of Anglophiles like Obeysekere is drastically lowered. Seen from this perspective, Obeysekere is something like the Prince in Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s The Leopard. The Sicilian aristocrat has to, ruefully, accept the fact that he has become an anachronism. Obeysekere is eventually in the same situation, his Anglophilia and Anglo-mores no longer being advantageous as paths to status and power. But this states the novel’s perspective too simply; for while Obeysekere represents a regime and a way of thought that are dying,  Michelle de Kretser is not so simplistic as to see de-colonisation as an unmixed blessing. It creates its own major problems. It is clear that Obeysekere’s one-time brother-in-law Donald Jayasinghe is a cynical opportunist. “Jaya” has never been a devoutly religious person, but when independence is looming, he suddenly starts wearing saffron Buddhist robes, professes to be a devoted Buddhist, and makes himself a political leader, giving rabble-rousing speeches about Sinhalese supremacism and generally stirring up contempt for the large Tamil minority. In other words, freedom from British rule opens an opportunity for racist demagogues. Amidst all his self-deception, Obeysekere might have a point when he longs for the old Ceylon where everyone was simply Ceylonese and – allowing for the many disadvantages of British overlordship – everyone was more-or-less on the same footing.

Incidentally, the novel’s brief coda reverts to first-person narration, but this time it is the voice of a Tamil once again giving an account the Hamilton case, and showing how judgements and rumours about that case influenced attitudes and shaped the directions in which the novel’s leading characters were pushed. [To enhance your own reading, if you choose to read The Hamilton Case, I have deliberately not gone into the specific details of the case.] In her Acknowledgements, Michelle de Kretser notes all the history books and memoirs that she used as references when writing this novel. Many of them touched upon the element of social caste, true stories of murder, and how the law worked under British rule. Surprisingly, she also references a long short-story by Somerset Maugham, Footprints in the Jungle, as an influence. Remember all those stories and plays (notably The Letter) which Maugham wrote about decadent and wilting British planters in Malaya? There’s at least a whiff of that in the fictitious Hamilton case, even if it’s not set in Malaya, and some specifics of the “Hamilton case” are indeed similar to Footprints in the Jungle. But de Kretser’s approach is very different from Maugham’s.

When all this is noted, however, I find that the real strength of The Hamilton Case is not the narrative thread but Michelle de Kretser’s powers of evocation. Her observation of specific details is precise in clothes and wealthy peoples’ houses and pastimes, and ageing and signals of petty snobbery and everyday markers of status and gradual changes in mores. We can smell, see, hear Ceylon / Sri Lanka with a vividness and immediacy that very few writers are capable of summoning. In short, to read this powerful novel is to live in another reality.

Silly Footnote: I am bemused that Michelle de Kretser named one of her minor characters Conrad Nagel. Surely she was aware that this was the name of a movie heart-throb in the late silent and early talkie era?

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First published in 2007, Michelle de Kretser’s next novel The Lost Dog begins with an epigraph from the notebooks of Henry James: “The whole of anything can never be told.” The Lost Dog is in large part a novel about a quest to uncover the whole of a number of mysteries. The leading character is constantly trying to fathom why certain things that have happened are discussed only in a cryptic or mystifying way. But in doing so, he has to interrogate all the things that have shaped his own life, from early childhood to the present. There are elements of suspense in this novel as we wait for answers to be given; but in the end, the “mystery” story is really a thread on which to hang the analysis of a person.

Tom Loxley is an academic in Melbourne, currently researching and writing a book about Henry James and his interest in ghosts or the uncanny. The novel is told in the third-person limited style, so we get only Tom’s perspective on things. Tom’s beloved dog has gone missing. Over ten days, Tom goes looking for the dog in the bush and wilderness outside Melbourne. Each chapter takes us through a new day in his search. But the narrative isn’t linear. In every chapter there are flashbacks, memories, and other things that happen during Tom’s dogged search. In a way, with its separate episodes in different time-frames, the novel is a sort of bricolage. Tom is searching as much for himself as he is searching for the dog – trying to work out how he has come to be the sort of person he now is. This means many thoughts about time and memory and how our recall of the past can be distorted. These are very Jamesian concerns, and the novel is peppered with allusions to Henry James. At one point Tom muses “It was the selective vision of hindsight, he reasoned, that set a figure in the carpet” (p.35) [all page references are to the 2009 Back Bay Press paperback edition of the novel] Elsewhere, he gives somebody a copy of The Turn of the Screw to read, and inevitably there are discussions on the novelist. Sometimes Tom reflects that we are burdened with memory and a sense of the past. Perhaps animals are luckier because they do not have the same sort of memory as we do: “Animals do not suffer as we do. They do not live in time, they are not nostalgic for the past, they do not imagine a better future, and so they lack an awareness of mortality. They might fear death when it is imminent, but they do not dread it as we do.” (p.68) While the lost dog in this novel is a physical reality, the dog is also a metaphor for the many things in our lives that are lost to the past.

And what of the past that Tom Loxley can recall? He is the son of ethnically-mixed parents. His father was a drunken ne’er-do-well Englishman who stayed in India after it gained its independence. His mother Iris is Indian, Catholic, and with some Portuguese ancestors. Tom and his family migrated to Australia in 1972 when he was fourteen. Tom is dark-skinned and recognisably Indian, which means he’s sometimes subject to abuse at school in Australia.  (Michelle de Kretser can credibly reconstruct the child Tom’s reactions to Australia as she had a similar background; she was the daughter of ethnically-mixed parents – Sinhalese and some Dutch ancestors – and he family migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia in 1972 when she was fourteen.) Tom’s mother Iris is still alive. He regularly visits her but she is old, feeble, forgetful and incontinent (there are grisly details of her physical decline and bowel problems). Tom can vaguely recall that she was once a fashionable belle. Tom is divorced, but his ex-wife Karen is still very much on his mind. Here are more accounts of what time has carried away. Then there is Tom’s self-doubt about being an academic and dealing with intellectual matters. His lack of confidence is most marked in the sequence where he is part of a committee deciding which candidate to hire as junior lecturer (see pp. 220-221). How has everything made him this man?

But the greatest mystery in his life surrounds the artist Nelly Zhang, who plays up her Chinese ethnicity even though she has more European than Chinese forebears. Tom, in his broken and unhappy way, is very much attracted to Nelly. At certain points she actually joins him in his search for the missing dog. But there are problems and mysteries surrounding Nelly. What happened, some years back, to her late husband Felix Atwell who disappeared without trace? Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? And what exactly is Nelly’s relationship to the (apparently very manipulative) art-dealer Posner, complicated by their treatment of Nelly’s son Rory. De Kretser does eventually give us (and Tom) a sort of resolution to these mysteries, but in a very Jamesian way, reminding us of that epigraph “The whole of anything can never be told.”   I will give no spoilers here, but I do note that, as in The Hamilton Case, much of the novel considers the repercussions of a crime, showing us the power of the past.

Many of de Kretser’s strengths as a writer are here. Her powers of description are outstanding, conjuring up the precise nature of the family’s earlier life and habitation in India or the bohemian milieu in which Nelly Zhang creates her art.  She is excellent in reading social trends and change in her close descriptions of physical things. Here she is showing how part of a city has become gentrified: “It was a neighbourhood on the way up. The butcher had taken to stocking free-range eggs. The doctors no longer bulk-billed. Wooden plantation blinds were replacing cutwork nylon in windows. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered across verandahs; neighbours fell out over parking for their four-wheel drives. Pubs that had featured topless waitresses now offered trivia nights and wood-fired pizza. It was easier to buy a latte than a litre of milk. The roomy weatherboard places on the big corner lots were coming down; town houses were going up. There were fewer lemon trees and more roof gardens….” (p.83)

De Kretser is concerned with the fact that, apart from Aborigines, all Australians are really immigrants, and there is an underlying guilt among European-Australians which they find difficult to acknowledge, especially as so many European-Australians resent more recent immigrants from Asian countries: “Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselfishly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dreams. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty film. It was a confession coded as a denial. It was as if a fiend had paused in its ravaging to cover its face and howl.” (p.234)

Interestingly, though, de Kretser saves most of her ire not for out-and-out racists, but for liberals who only play at being tolerant or positive about non-European immigrants and their culture. Such people are usually patronising. Here are Tom’s thoughts on his ex-wife Karen: “Karen was the product of the usual liberal, middle-class upbringing that tolerated Asian Immigration while not expecting to encounter it at the altar. The prospect of union with Tom had satisfied both her need to rebel and her social conscience, the same erotic fusion she sought, years later, in adultery….” (p.102) In other words, marrying and bedding an Asian man is her way of showing the world that she is a good liberal… without really liking her husband. Elsewhere Tom ridicules his ex-wife’s approach to Hinduism: “Karen informed Tom that India was spiritual. From the great shrines at Madurai and Kanyakumari, she returned marigold-hung and exalted. At dinner parties in Australia she would speak of the extraordinary atmosphere of India’s sacred precincts. Tom desisted from comparisons with Lourdes, where the identical spectacle of ardent belief and flagrant commercialism had worked on his wife’s Protestant sensibilities as fingernails on a blackboard. The glaze of exoticism transformed superstitious nonsense into luminous grace. Karen’s good faith was manifest. Yet her insistence on the spirituality of India struck Tom as self-serving. It wafted her effortlessly over the misery of degraded lives, for the poorest Indian possessed such spiritual riches, after all.” (p.160) Claiming to admire a foreign religion is another marker of liberal chic. But there is a big – and I am sure deliberate – ambiguity about Tom’s comments on Karen. After all, he is hurt by losing Karen as a wife. Thinking of her in these negative terms may be his way of consoling himself. Unreliable narrator? Possibly.

Like most of de Krester’s novels, The Lost Dog requires close attention of the reader, especially in terms of shifting time frames in the narrative and in keeping track of which character is related to whom. In this respect, however, it is not as challenging as her later novel The Life to Come.

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If one were to judge by on-line comments, Questions of Travel (first published in 2012) is either Michelle de Kretser’s most esteemed novel or her most reviled novel. It is a very long novel and – to rush to judgement – I admit that I began reading it with delight only to gradually lose interest as it seemed to reiterate again and again points it had already made. Many of de Kretser’s works are built on flashbacks, flash-forwards and reminiscences and are anything but linear. Questions of Travel breaks the mould by being very linear. The narrative marches from the 1960s, when the two main characters are children, to 2012, when they are in middle-age. Alternative chapters deal with the one and then with the other.

Ravi is Sri Lankan. For him life is a struggle. Civil war is raging between Sinhalese and Tamils. There is much violence in the street. Ravi marries and has a child. Ravi has a degree in maths and learns about computer science. He daydreams about being recruited by Silicon Valley; but the best he gets is a university position as an assistant lecturer. He is bound by his family’s traditions, though he chafes at much that he is expected to do – and as in some of her other novels , Michelle de Kretser gives us very detailed accounts and descriptions of Sri Lankan customs and modes of living. There is the possibility that Ravi will get a scholarship that will take him overseas, but it never happens. He feels trapped. Then disaster strikes. Ravi’s wife Malini is an outspoken activist who makes public speeches condemning the violence of both Sinhalese and Tamil. She and her little son are murdered and hacked up into little pieces by persons unknown. It could be Sinhalese or Tamil terrorists. It could even be the police, who are known to condone and sometimes participate in terrorism. Ravi has to flee to somewhere safer, as he himself could be a target for murder. In a long and complex fashion (I won’t go into the details) Ravi gets a visa allowing him to stay in Australia for three months. He heads for Australia in the hope of declaring himself a refugee and seeking permanent asylum. If you think I have given away too much plot here, please note that this takes us only halfway through Ravi’s saga.

Meanwhile, alternate chapter by alternate chapter, we get the very different story of a very different person. Laura is Australian. For some reason, the author emphasises that Laura is plain – indeed ugly. Unsure what she will do with her life, Laura gets a windfall in the form of a legacy. So she does what all young people with uncertain prospects want to do. She goes travelling. She tours all over Europe and when funds run low she settles in England and takes up such jobs as waitressing. She also tries to consort with intellectuals – or at least with people who present themselves as intellectuals. But she wants to make a better living, so bit by bit she is able to insert herself as a freelancer for a travel magazine called The Wayfarer (Michelle de Kretser is obviously drawing here on her own years of writing travel articles for Lonely Planet). Gradually she becomes a regular staffer, which means more junkets to foreign countries to write slushy PR travel articles. For some years she settles in Naples and takes to idolising the Neapolitan way of live, no matter how impoverished the lives of common people are. But time is moving on and she begins, in her mid-thirties, to feel nostalgic for the country of her birth. She returns to Sydney.

The dichotomy built into this is clear. Ravi comes to Australia out of need – to save his life. Laura comes back to Australia because of nostalgia. One is a real traveller. The other is a tourist, and much of this novel is a critique of the whole phenomenon of tourism, hence the title (actually a quotation from a poem) Questions of Travel. So many tourists believe what is in the travel magazines and in glossy brochures. As a result they often, with their superficial gaze, ignore what a foreign country really is like.

The second half of the novel is set in Oz – the prolonged and uncertain attempts of Ravi and sympathisers to get him Australian citizenship as a refugee; Laura’s insertion into a publishing company; Ravi looking for work and sometimes having to lodge with unsympathetic people; Laura looking for love (but in the end finding only sex). And while Laura is on the writing side of things; and Ravi is on the IT side of things; the two of them happen to end up working for the same corporation. Don’t expect a neat “happy ending” – that is not de Kretser’s style. This novel is soaked in irony, and de Kretser hits some of her favourite targets – misogyny in the workplace (casual harassment of women); patronising people who claim to support refugees and people of other ethnicities – but only so they can score brownie points as good liberals; tourists who claim to be in search of “authentic” cultures, but who really still want the mod coms and Western comforts in all their travels; and of course the xenophobia that is apparently built into much Australian life. Some of the novel takes place during the “Tampa” incident and the whole raucous debate in Australia about welcoming or rejecting refugees.

Oddly enough, it is some of the minor characters who stay longest in the mind. There is Theo Newman, a German-Jewish “intellectual”, covertly gay, whom Laura befriends in London, claiming to be at work on a thesis but never finishing it and eventually succumbing to drink. He could be written off as a pseudo-intellectual until we are made aware of his traumatic backstory. There is the old Italian Carlo, whom Laura regularly visits, partly to keep alive her connection with Italian culture, even if the old guy punctures many of her romantic assumptions about Italy. There is a twittery and self-promoting woman with the outrageous name Tracy Lacey – it is almost as if de Kretser has plucked this character out of an early Evelyn Waugh novel. There is the Ethiopian woman Hana desperately trying to turn herself into an Australian. And there are the various men who pass through Laura’s life, none of them committing themselves to her. Is her superficial sex life an analogue for her superficial tourist view of the world?

To her great credit, de Kretser does not present Ravi as a mere “victim”. Despite his tragic situation, he is a complex character with a negative side – certainly he is an opportunist, and even before the horror that is visited on him, we hear him lamenting the fact that he has married and has a child, which he sees as a burden holding back his career. He is very critical of some of the people who are seeking to help him in Australia – but then we are made aware of the great, and sometimes unreasonable, hurdles that the Australian legal system sets up to thwart his hope of gaining refugee status.

And yet, to return to my original judgement, for all the novel’s astute observation, satire and tragedy, it does drag along in its later pages. We got all the points the author had to make long before she wrote Finis.

[PART TWO OF MICHELLE DE KRETSER’S FICTION WILL APPEAR IN THE NEXT POSTING]