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 TWO
First published in 2014, Springtime is a short novella, easily read at one sitting. It is subtitled “A Ghost Story”, but it is very much in the tradition of some of Henry James’ stories – especially The Turn of the Screw. Is there really a ghost or is the ghost a figment of a disturbed person’s imagination? Bear in mind that Michelle de Kretser pondered much on Henry James in her earlier novel The Lost Dog and also had some Jamesian references in Questions of Travel.
Frances has moved from Melbourne to Sydney. Frances is in her twenties. Her partner Charlie has left his wife and young son Luke to be with her. Charlie is quite a few years older that Frances. Frances is not really capable of dealing with young Luke when he pays them a visit. Frances sometimes hears odd noises on her phone and wonders if they are malign messages from Charlie’s ex-wife. Frances is unnerved by her situation.
When Frances takes her dog Rod on walks around their Sydney suburb, she sees through the trees a strange woman who seems not real. The strange woman appears to her only when Frances is alone on a path. Is this a ghost? Frances is further unnerved. I offer no spoiler, but I can say that the novel’s conclusion gives us a definite verdict.
This novella is really about adjustment to a new environment. Sydney is very different from Melbourne. Frances is an intellectual (researching a book on 18th century French portraits) and so is Charlie. Intellectuals are notoriously bitchy and there is a party scene of unpleasant intellectual one-up-man-ship, further intimidating Frances. Melburnians often regard themselves a superior to uncouth Sydneysiders. And then there is the more intense heat.
As always, Michelle de Kretser’s powers of precise observation are excellent, a time and place are conjured up vividly and Frances’ situation is credible. Even so, Springtime is very much a minor work by de Kretser and in retrospect the “ghost” element is redundant – a bit of a trick.
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Here is a warning to anybody who wishes to read the novels of Michelle de Kretser. Do not start with The Life to Come (first published in 2017) or it may deter you from reading her other work. This is definitely NOT to say that The Life to Come is an inferior piece of work. Far from it. But in terms of structure, it is a very difficult work. Characters we at first think are going to be the novel’s main protagonists are shoved aside as new characters are introduced. The novel is not a linear narrative. There are flashbacks and flash-forwards and sometimes we discover a young person has suddenly transformed into an old person. It takes a long time to see how the opening chapters are in fact related to the later chapters. Indeed I went through a phase of wondering whether The Life to Come was really a set of long short stories, loosely connected, rather than a novel. And yet, in its final and most compelling long chapter, it is all knitted together like a puzzle finally solved. In short, this is a novel that requires close attention of the reader.
What does that title The Life to Come mean? I’m sure de Kretser is aware that the phrase has often been used in religious services to mean life after death, or the promise of heaven. But that is not what it means in this novel. The “life to come” is the life that characters expect to be living some day: their aspirations and hope for success, always looking forward rather than living the moment. But such hopes are often delusory as is the case with at least some of the characters. Ultimately there is disappointment for those who have too high an opinion of themselves. Possibly – as is at least implied in the closing chapter – the best “life to come” is simply living everyday life without expecting reward or great public applause.
Many in de Kretser’s cast are novelists and the condition of being a novelist is one of her major concerns. So too – as so often – is her interest in the state of being an immigrant or refugee in a new country. In the opening chapter is Ash, a Sinhalese Sri-Lankan living in Sydney, working towards being an academic, and meeting the completely alien when he visits that dead heart of Australia’s hinterland and the type of farmers who work there. For a time he cohabits with the Australian Cassie. At one point Cassie remarks “postmodernly tutored… ‘Isn’t history just a set of competing stories?’ ” to which Ash replies laconically “Not really”. (p. 52) His understanding that there are hard realities in history is rooted in the fact that, as a child in Sri Lanka, he saw the riots between Sinhalese and Tamil and the concerted killing of Tamil. It was not just a story. In fact in many ways, de Kretser takes on the current modish dogmas of academe. Cassie is studying Australian literature. Cassie’s tutor criticises the fiction of Shirley Hazzard because “one of Hazzard’s stories sinned in implying that a former colony’s efforts to modernise might entail painful consequences for its citizens…” (p.59) Michelle de Kretser knows damned well that modernising a former colony always does have some “painful consequences”. [Incidentally, de Kretser is an expert on the work of Shirley Hazzard and has written a book about her.]
When the novel switches from Sydney to Paris, we get a different cast, centring on Celeste, an elderly translator of books, living a single life, never quite admitting (or acting out) her lesbianism and always vaguely hoping to make a married woman her partner. Again, there are culture-clash problems. Celeste’s mother was French but Celeste was raised in West Australia. In Paris, Celeste and her mother have seen the ethnic tension of the early 1960s when Algerians were targeted and harassed by French police.
Then, taking a very large part of the novel, there is the ambitious Australian novelist Pippa Reynolds. Pippa marries a guy called Matt, whose parents are Polish. Matt’s mother Eva is not only Catholic – very alien to Pippa – but is also intensely concerned about the welfare of refugees, especially in an Australian political climate that does not welcome refugees. But Pippa, often very critical of other people, wonders if Eva’s compassion for refugees is just a sham and a pose – a way of scoring points with liberal friends. There are such people, after all. Yet there is much ambiguity here. Eva is domineering, but Pippa is far too ready to judge other people. Could it be that Eva is truly compassionate while Pippa simply lacks charity? The situation can be read either way. In another context, Pippa, in the closing chapters, encounters a Sri-Lankan woman Christabel, and Christabel’s Anglo-Sri-Lankan friend known as “Bunty”, again with many misunderstanding between ethnicities.
So, with Australian and Sri-Lankan; French-Australian and Algerian; Australian and Pole, here are many situations of culture-clash, bafflement, misdirected ideas and misunderstanding – played out in Australia and France.
Yet just as important is de Kretser’s focus on the nature of novelists and by implication the nature of truth-telling and the distortion of the truth. To put it simply, de Kretser takes a very critical view of novelists, even if she herself is dedicated to the profession. There are, for example, novels, barely comprehensible, that appear to be designed for an intellectual, and somewhat snobbish, coterie – a form of chic. In Celeste’s trade as a translator, “she translated books for a small New York press that published obscure European fiction, novels devoid of spirited heroines, novels that offered no clear message nor any flashing sign as to how that should be understood… sometimes they were even Swiss.” (p. 96) There is, too, in the novel’s last chapter, a scornful, semi-comic account of a Readers and Writers Festival in Sydney, which takes apart both the performance tricks of the starring novelists and the vapid nature of the audience.
Pippa Reynolds is the epitome of an ambitious young novelist and apparently quite successful. But she desperately wants to be admired, is constantly posting tweets promoting herself, and is extremely competitive to the point of being abrasive. There is a hint here and there that she is intensely insecure since her parents’ marriage disintegrated when she was a child. More cuttingly, de Kretser suggests that she is essentially a voyeur, taking other peoples’ lives and using them as material for her novels often in a very cruel way, describing habits that real acquaintances have, using conversations jotted down after going to dinner parties with real people and so forth. In effect, using people. This comes to a head in the last (and best) chapter when Christabel confronts Pippa whom she had trustingly believed was her friend.
… But isn’t this what all novelists do somehow? And is de Kretser in fact criticising herself? The critique is valid but the irony is there to read.
I can’t close without noting that there are many meals described in this novel, be they domestic scenes or at literary or diplomatic junkets. They always seem to say something about ethnicity and Westerners’ taste for what is “exotic”… but also meals often reveal different ethnicities taste and suggest what often puts peoples at odds. A fascinating form of sociology.
Despite my opening caveats, the novel finally holds together.
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Published in 2021, Scary Monsters is really two separable short novels, each approximately 150 pages long. You have to turn the book upside down when you finish one and wish to get on with the other, because one is printed this-way-up and the other is printed that-way-up, if you understand what I mean. Each has a different "front cover". Even if she has clear preoccupations and concerns, I would never accuse de Kretser of being didactic, but Scary Monsters conveys specific messages more overtly than most of her works do. In case you were wondering what this book’s “scary monsters” are, they are conveniently defined in the blurb, to wit “racism, misogyny and ageism”, trends which figure in both these short novels. Both of the two novels are narrated in the first-person, one by Lyle and the other by Lili. By pure chance, I began by reading the “Lyle” novel first.
The setting is Australia, but a very dystopian Australia in the near future. Immigrants and refugees are treated very badly. The country has absolutely no climate policy. Some parts of the continent are now labelled PFZs – Permanent Fire Zones – as huge bush-fires are always out of hand. And the government clamps down on all forms of dissent. At one point Lyle, who works for a government department, has to ask questions to weed out potential subversives – questions such as “Is anyone in your community leafleting farmers about sustainable crops or tree-planting or animal rights?... Anyone speaking out against Proud Nazis? Anyone advocating for Aboriginal rights or women’s refuges or a universal basic income?” (p.85) Lyle fears the possible repercussions for his family as his son Sydney is an ardent Greenie, and his daughter Mel [presumably short for Melbourne], when she talks furtively with liberal friends, finds it’s desirable to say she’s a New Zealander because New Zealand is less racist than Australia and “being Australian is so like shameful. Everyone just assumes you’re a racist, Islamophobic climate vandal and coffee snob.” (p.77)
Which brings us to another issue. In this Australia, Islam has been outlawed. Lyle’s heritage is Muslim, but he and his family have to renounce their former religion and take on non-Muslim names. Former Muslims now have names like Ikea, Porsche, Chanel, Fanta and Prada, suggesting that the accepted religion is consumerism. And, to be approved by his employers, Lyle has to play such charming computer games as Whack-a-Mullah. As an immigrant, Lyle notes “Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared. Immigrants are people with missing pieces.” (p.15) He can never be an Australian in terms that would fully appease the government. What’s more “Every newcomer to this country fears repatriation. Even those born here aren’t exempt if their parents or grandparents weren’t – one immigrant in four is enough.” (p.50)
The “scary monster” of racism is clear to see, but what of the misogyny and ageism? Lyle’s wife Chanel is a buxom woman, but she is told to have breast-reduction surgery before she will be accepted as a suitable company executive. Then there is Lyle’s elderly in-law Ivy, an eccentric who was once an ardent Communist but is used to luxury. When she is not ignored or ridiculed (more misogyny), she is being coaxed into submitting to euthanasia, as the nice, kind government has passed an Amendment making it easier to put old people down (extreme ageism), obviously to get rid of the non-earning, pension-granted elderly. To gussy it up, the moment of killing is called a Joyful Occasion.
The “Lyle” novel is obviously a work of raw protest against current trends in Australian society, but it has a singular subtlety. Remember Lyle, a covert Muslim, works for a government department which is part of the mechanism of his own intimidation. He conforms to the very policies that dehumanise him. This may suggest to us that he is craven. But I suggest de Kretser is warning us, in comfy democratic countries, that it is too easy to condemn “collaborators”. What other options do people have if they want to survive under a totalitarian regime?
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Flipping the book over, I find the “Lili” novel to be totally different in tone from the “Lyle” novel, even if similar issues are raised. Far from dealing with a dystopian future, the “Lili” novel is set in the past – the early 1980s – in France. Bear in mind that in the early 1980s, when she was in her twenties, de Kretser took a Master degree in Paris. It is hard to avoid the idea that at least some of “Lili” is built on her youthful memories of France, even if the tale is fiction. Indeed some of it reads as nostalgic, light-hearted and amusing student matters, even if there is a large downside to the story.
The narrator Lili has gone to Montpellier to teach English. She is an Australian, though some of her forebears were Armenian and many came from an (unspecified) Asian country – very much the situation of the Sri Lankan Australian Michelle de Kretser. Lili aspires to be an independent, fearless, feminist intellectual, modelling herself on Simone de Beauvoir; but in fact she is timid and tortured with a sense of loneliness. She makes friends with a much more confident young women called Minna who has a boyfriend called Nick. Minna is progressive. Minna condemns racism. Minna expresses daring left-wing views… except that at the same time Minna likes the most chic clothes, the best restaurants, and the latest fashion. Much of Lili’s experience is discovering who or what exactly Minna really is. She comes to realize that free-wheeling, confident Minna actually has family money resources and relies very much on her boyfriend Nick’s work. At a point where Lili is disillusioned with Minna, she thinks scornfully “Dependent women and bread-winning men: the Bold, Intelligent Woman had relied on a conventional script.” (p.56). Another thing nags at her. Has Minna befriended her solely because she [Lili] is “ethnic” and therefore it is chic for Minna to be able to show off, to her liberal friends, her brown-skinned friend? In Lili’s mind “There was the thought of rich Minna versus poor Lili. There was the thought of white Minna versus brown Lili.” (p.57) In conversation with another young woman, Lili remarks of Minna “Saving brown people is a principle with her… It’s the reason she’s friends with me.” (pp.104-105)
De Kretser has presented similar purely-performative anti-racists elsewhere in her oeuvre [notably in The Life to Come]; but she does not stoop to caricature, for in later sections of the “Lili” novel, we learn that Minna has her own problems and is not a totally unsympathetic character.
The matter of racism is raised in the interaction of Lili and Minna; but it is also in the environment of 1980s France, where there are still tensions with, and prohibitions against, immigrants – especially Algerians. There are still painful memories of the Second World War, when French collaborators helped send French Jews to the death camps. And (referring to Albert Camus’ Algerian-set novel L’Etranger), Lili comes to wonder if some esteemed French literature isn’t also racist. She thinks: “All round the world, young people are studying a really brilliant novel about the murder of an Arab. They would say, If the most celebrated postwar French novel, venerated in France, is about the murder of an Arab, what might be the consequences of that? They would say, Why didn’t the Arab have a name? Then all the sentences would coalesce into a shiny purple headline: CE N’EST PAS NORMAL.” (pp.97-98)
Of the three “scary monsters”, ageism is largely absent from the “Lili” novel; but misogyny is rampant in the form of men who try to hit on young foreign women – especially Lili’s devious landlord M. Laval.
Given that she is dealing with young and rather callow main characters, de Kretser punctures their naïve optimism a little. The “Lili” novel ends with young people rejoicing that a Socialist (Mitterand) government has just won an election. Utopia and radical change seem to be dawning… except we, older, wiser and many decades later, know this is not going to happen.
Footnote: Even before the 1980s, when the “Lili” novel was set, there were already critics who pointed out the quasi-racist element of Camus’ L’Etranger. I refer to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s monograph on Albert Camus, published in the Fontana Modern Masters series in 1970, which still sits on my shelf. To add an egotistical anecdote, in 1971 or thereabouts, we freshers studying French at the University of Auckland had to read L’Etranger. One of the attractions of the novel, at least to freshers, was that it was short. In a tutorial, I dared to ask the lecturer why Mersault shot the Arab. In reply, the lecturer launched into a tirade about how you only had to live is Algeria to know how sneaky these Arabs are… Ouch!
A general assessment: So, having read all but one of Michelle de Kretser’s fictions, how do I assess her work? Obviously, she has some dominant ideas and themes. Drawing often on experience, she is interested in migrants and refugees and how they mix, or do not mix, into Western society. She is aware of widespread xenophobia in Australia, often linking her stories to current or historical facts or events. But she sharpens her satirical pen most often for liberals who claim to support new migrants, but who remain condescending towards foreign customs and ways of life. She is also very concerned with the matter of time, ageing and maturation. It is interesting that so many of her fictions rely on memories of a childhood or parental past. This is always in the interest of seeing how and why people grow up the way they do, and how distant events can have long-lasting consequences. Growing up also means interrogating sexual behaviour. Misogyny is one of her repeated targets. As an Australian citizen of long standing, de Kretser also can’t help considering the matter of colonisation – not only in Australia’s past, but also in the colonisation of Sri Lanka (and in one novel, India). But neatly setting out dominant “themes” like this does not really give the measure of the author. More than anything, de Kretser has an advanced skill in observation – she can describe people, customs, fashions, and especially places in such a precise way that they are presented to the eye, ear, nose and touch. And, while some of her characters earn our sympathy, she never indulges in sentimentality. Even migrants and refugees who are victimised are whole characters – they are not saints.
Is Michelle de Kretser a great novelist? It’s too early to say. While admiring and following many of her narratives, I also found some things that read in a confusing way. I’ll leave it to history to assess her work.
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