Something New

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

“EDDA MUSSOLINI – The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe” by Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus; distributed by Penguin/ Random House, $NZ40); “SELLING BRITISHNESS – Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire” by Felicity Barnes (Auckland University Press, NZ$49:99)

            Caroline Moorehead is a very capable historian, journalist and biographer who has written about many and varied lives. Her three most recent books have focused on people in Fascist Italy. A Bold and Dangerous Family dealt with an anti-Fascist partisan family and A House in the Mountains looked at the Italian partisan women fighting both Fascists and Nazi invaders in the civil war in northern Italy during the last phases of the Second World War. In both books, however, historical context loomed as large as biographical detail  (see my review of The House in the Mountains below). In effect, while highlighting particular people, Caroline Moorehead was really giving us a general history as much as, or even more than, biography.

 

            Edda Mussolini – The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe follows very much the same path. It certainly gives us the woman’s life but it is also a complete history of Fascist Italy from go to woe (and I really do mean woe), with Edda herself often side-lined. To get past one small quibble which does not mar a very good book, was Edda Mussolini really “the most dangerous woman in Europe”? The phrase was coined in 1939 in an obscure Egyptian magazine called Images, which went on to say that she “rules her father [Benito Mussolini] with an iron fist”. (p.235) By 1939, Edda Mussolini was well-known for her informal diplomatic missions,  buttering up English, French and German diplomats to woo them into accepting her father’s actions. Also in 1939, the American Time magazine put Edda Mussolini on its front cover, its journalist describing her as “Gaunt, pale faced… outstanding in ability, personality and intelligence… one of Europe’s most successful intriguers and string-pullers…” (p.212) But was she the most dangerous woman in Europe? I think others of the time might also have claimed that sobriquet. (Start with Ilsa Koch and keep looking.)

            So much for my one quibble.

            Edda Mussolini was born in 1910. At the time her father was a gifted and rabble-rousing journalist and a dedicated Socialist. It was the First World War, and his approval of soldiers and military authority, that made him turn against Socialism and create the Fascist Party. Edda was the eldest of Rachele and Benito Mussolini’s children. When she was a child “Journalists, constantly following the family’s every move, spoke of her grace and charm. In reality she was awkward, prickly and combative, with an excellent memory and a habit of caricaturing her own defects, hiding her skills and virtues as if she were ashamed on them…” (p.54) Eventually, the Mussolinis would have five children, but even from her earliest years, Edda was aware that her father had many mistresses and a number of bastard children; and frequently her father bellowed and fought with her mother. Edda was 12 when her father staged his so-called “March on Rome” and then bullied the king into making him prime-minister. There followed four or five years in the 1920s as Mussolini moved on to creating a totalitarian, one-party state. Only when things had more-or-less settled down for the regime (at the time of the Concordat with the Vatican in 1929) did Mussolini bring his family to live with him in Rome.

Despite the family’s long separation, and despite the fights she sometimes had with her father, young Edda still tended to idolise him. Her parents curated the boyfriends she was able to socialise with, and presented her with various potential suitors whom she rejected. Finally, in 1930 when she was 19, she married Count Galeazzo Ciano in a spectacularly-staged wedding. Ciano was 27. The two of them were supposed to be role-models for Fascist youth. “Edda was to stand for everything that was best about Fascist womanhood, while Ciano carved out the path of the ‘new Italian man’. Whether either of them wanted this role, or were suited to it, no one paused to consider.” (p.77)

As it happened, the private lives were very different from the public image. The couple were posted to Shanghai where Ciano worked as a diplomat, was successful in getting Chang Kai-Shek to adopt Fascist ideas and was able to sell Italian warplanes to the Chinese Nationalists, at a time when Japan had invaded Manchuria. Despite her youth, Edda proved to be a very capable society and diplomatic hostess. But Galeazzo Ciano was as much of a philanderer as Mussolini was and Edda was constantly outraged by stories of his affairs with Chinese women.

Called back to Italy, Ciano became the head of the regime’s propaganda department. These years, the early 1930s, were the heyday of Italian Fascism. On the whole, the Italian people accepted the regime, despite the covert brutality meted out to dissenters;  and Mussolini was wooed by democratic countries – especially England and France – as a possible bulwark against both Communism and the rising power of Nazism. It is often forgotten that Mussolini at first pitted himself against Hitler. In 1934 he sent divisions up to the Austrian border, effectively preventing Hitler from taking over Austria.

However, it is at this point in her narrative that Caroline Moorehead gives a detailed panorama of Fascist high society – the massive corruption practised by Fascist grandees; the personal fiefdoms created by local Fascist leaders;  the extravagant public displays eating away at the nation’s wealth; the rivalries and bitcheries between tradition aristocrats and newly-powerful Fascisti, played out in fashionable salons; the coordination of all social movements into Fascist control, including the suppression of Catholic youth movements. In the newspapers and magazines , Edda and Ciano were presented as the regime’s glamour couple, but by this stage both of them were having adulterous affairs (even if all three children that Edda eventually had were fathered by Ciano).

The mood changed in the mid-1930s, and in effect began the long disintegration of the Fascist regime. Early in 1935, Edda went to London to sound out whether or not Britain would really oppose Mussolini’s intention to invade Abyssinia (Ethiopia). She was welcomed in chic circles and basically understood that while Britain might half-heartedly pronounce sanctions against Italy, Britain would undertake no military action. So Italian warships were able to pass through the  Suez Canal (still largely controlled by the British) and be part of the brutal invasion of Abyssinia in which both Ciano and some of Mussolini’s sons took part. The next year, Mussolini was sending troops to help Franco in the Spanish Civil War and by this stage the British and French were aware that Mussolini was now drifting into Hitler’s orbit. So to the so-called “Pact of Steel”, the forming of the Axis. Mussolini was flattered to help broker the Munich Agreement in 1938, where the British and French weakly caved in and allowed Hitler to take over the Sudetenland. But Mussolini was quickly made aware that he was now bound to Hitler and the very-much-weaker partner of the Axis. Hitler didn’t bother to forewarn him that he was about to take over the rest of Czechoslovakia, annex Austria and make a pact with Stalin which allowed him to invade Poland and in effect  set off the Second World War.

And what was Edda doing in these years? Often she was a go-between with Nazi Germany. Just as often she was, like her husband, living a frivolous life, regularly holidaying in Capri, socialising and (one of her worst vices) gambling for great sums and usually losing. And yet she could rouse herself to worthwhile action when she put her mind to it. Later, when Italy was drawn into the war, she trained as a nurse and was apparently a very effective one in military hospitals.

Little point in my going into detail of the Fascist regime’s brutal decline, even though it is chronicled diligently by Caroline Moorehead. Mussolini committed Italy to the war in mid-1940, hoping to gain territory from Nazi-dominated France. He didn’t get what he wanted. Trying to build an empire, he endorsed the Italian attacks on Albania and then on Greece. For Italy, both campaigns were disastrous. In North Africa, Italian forces were defeated by the British and [literally] thousands of Italian soldiers became prisoners of war. Germany took over Greece and the North African campaign. Hatred for Mussolini grew in Italy, now under regular bombardment from Allied planes. In July 1943, the Italian king and the Fascist grand council voted to depose Mussolini and make terms with the Allies. Result? Germany now invaded Italy, treating it as an enemy state, followed by the long campaign as American, British and Commonwealth troops fought their way up Italy against stiff German opposition. And finally there was the brutal civil war (partisans versus Fascists and Nazis) that was waged in Northern Italy. For much of a year, Mussolini, who had been whisked away by German commandos, was able to “rule” a tiny Nazi-supported “republic” in the north. He had Count Ciano executed as a “traitor” for having been one of those who voted for his deposition. Finally Mussolini and his most recent mistress Clara Petacci were intercepted by partisans, shot dead and, with other prominent Fascists, hanged upside-down in a piazza in Milan.

If there is any moment in this whole lamentable tale where Edda becomes a sympathetic character, it is in the months when she set aside her annoyance at her husband’s infidelity, dedicated herself to him, and repeatedly begged her father not to have Ciano executed. Mussolini turned down her requests. You also have to give her points for looking after her three children – she was canny enough to have them sent to Switzerland, where she escaped to join them in the last months of the war. In these matters, for all her faults, she was a forgiving wife and a caring mother – not that she can be absolved of all the intrigues, plotting and devious deals she had made, in a very bad cause, over the years. She and her children survived that war (as did Mussolini’s wife Rachelle) and lived on in post-Fascist Italy.

When I sum up Edda Mussolini, I see some of the same features as her father – considerable intelligence, powers of persuasion, many skills, but little moral compass (except in her last days) a huge ego and much delusion working in a very bad cause. She might have often fought with her father, but she was very much her father’s daughter.

The most ambiguous person in this history, however, is Galeazzo Ciano. Despite his playboy ways and serial infidelity, he had the intelligence to see what was wrong with the regime and its ambitions. When made foreign minister, he had to meet the leading Nazis and he was unimpressed by them: “Unlike Edda, Ciano did not warm to the senior Nazis whom he met. He took an instant dislike to Ribbentrop, soon to be the German Foreign Minister, calling him a fool; he dismissed Goring as a ‘fat, vulgar ox’, capable, but interested chiefly in money and decorations; and he was wary of the ‘small, olive skinned’ cripple Goebbels, who lacked, Ciano said, the ‘stupid frankness of is colleagues’. To his mind, it was clear that Hitler was bloodthirsty and a bit mad. Germany, he concluded, was in the ‘hands of men of very inferior quality whom we must exploit.’” (p.161) Regrettably, while his summary of Nazi leaders might have been accurate, he failed to see the real danger they threatened and misunderstood that they would soon be dominating Mussolini. Ciano cannot be forgiven for promoting the disastrous campaigns against Albania and Greece; but he did have his lucid and commendable moments. In the first half of 1940, when Mussolini was dithering over whether Italy should join the war, Ciano was trying to persuade him that war would be disastrous for Italy. In those months, Ciano even gave a speech in the Fascist general assembly, praising the Poles for standing up to Hitler’s aggression. And of course, in 1943 Ciano was one of those who realised that Mussolini had to go and capitulation to the Allies was the best course. There is also the fact that Ciano’s voluminous diaries, complete with denunciation of Fascist party leaders, were saved and hidden by Edda, much to the joy of later historians who have read them as invaluable records of the regime.

Once again, we have in Ciano a man of intelligence and some moral standards, but too often swayed by the glamour of power, too addicted to a sybaritic way of life, and too often ignoring his own better judgement. In the end, what a sad waste of real talent.

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For the record, I include here my brief review of Caroline Moorehead’s A House in the Mountains. The review appeared in the NZ Listener on 18 January 2020.

            The big picture was complicated. Mussolini had been deposed, but German commandos spirited him away to set up a puppet “republic” in the very north of Italy. The Allies advanced slowly from the south, facing stiff opposition from German troops who had invaded the country and now treated its population as a defeated enemy. Italian hopes for a quick end to their war were dashed. And in the north, an Italian civil war was going on. Anti-Fascist partisans fought die-hard Fascists. The Fascists were supported by the SS and German regulars. The partisans were supported only half-heartedly by the Allies, who were both far away and unwilling to risk too much with costly air-drops of equipment.

            Caroline Moorehead’s A House in the Mountains deals almost exclusively with the situation in the north, especially Piedmont and the city of Turin. Here clashes between partisans and Fascists were at their fiercest. For nineteen months, from September 1943 to April 1945, this region suffered German occupation and there was more partisan activity, and more civilian deaths, than in any other part of Italy. SS and Fascist reprisals usually meant massacres, especially as the Fascists smelled defeat.

            A House in the Mountains is subtitled “The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism”. Moorehead’s declared purpose is to restore to historical memory those women who were an important part of the partisan movement. She tries to focus on four women in particular who were “staffetta” (runners, couriers and guides), who did propaganda work for the partisans, and who sometimes joined the male partisans in fights, raids and hold-ups. She also deals with women factory-workers who led successful strikes to improve conditions in the face of Fascist opposition; mothers who tried to protect their sons from deportation to Germany; and a nun who helped anti-Fascist prisoners to escape and avoid torture. Their actions were unquestionably heroic and their role was often crucial.

            But there is a snag here, which often defeats Moorehead’s purpose. In order to make sense of the situation, she has to give us a general survey of the different aims of diverse partisan groups – Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats and independent bands – and the difficulties in coordinating them. In effect, Moorehead often shifts her focus away from the role of women. A House in the Mountains becomes a general history of the North Italian civil war.  There’s also the nagging fact that, until the last few months, almost as many Piedmontese supported Fascism as opposed it, and about the same proportion of women were in Fascist militias as were among the partisans.

            One interesting sidelight - this English author is particularly hard on British diplomats for their patronising attitude to Italian partisans. She paints the Americans as far more open-minded, despite their fear of partisan Communism.

She also ends on a rather dispiriting note. Post-war Italy, with its amnesties for most Fascist militias and its often-corrupt politics, was not the ideal country that the women partisans thought they were making. In real history, heroic endeavour often ends with a whimper, not a bang.

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Sometimes new books come my way a little late. Such was the case with Felicity Barnes’ Selling Britishness, subtitled “Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire”, which became available in November last year. Felicity Barnes, senior lecturer in the history department on the University of Auckland, has long specialised in studies of New Zealand’s colonial connections with Britain. In 2012, her detailed book New Zealand’s London (reviewed on this blog 12 November 2012) charted the social and cultural links between New Zealand and London, especially in the years between the two world wars.  Selling Britishness deals with the same era, but in this case Barnes’ focus is on the way “dominions” – meaning Canada, Australia and New Zealand – sold their produce to Britain by framing themselves as British.

As she notes in her opening chapter, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, in 1925, was the stimulus for marketing boards on Canada, Australia and New Zealand to begin aggressive publicity campaigns, telling Britain that they too were British and their goods were produced by Britishers. As Barnes notes, Canada, Australia and New Zealand had majority “white”  populations, whereas British colonies in Africa and Asia might have been ruled by British officials, but white populations were a minority – often a very small minority. Therefore it was harder for, say, India and South Africa to be presented as “white” lands and their marketing strategies were quite different from those of  Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There was also the fact that a considerable part of the Canadian population was French, a fact that Canadian marketers had to step delicately around.

So in chapter by chapter, Barnes chronicles scrupulously how “Britishness” was sold to Britain. There was what she calls the construction of an imaginary “community” (Chapter 2) , the pretence that the dominions were simply an extension of Britain, thus creating “consumer imperialism”. Extreme British groups like the Self-Supporting Empire League did not last long – with an aim of importing only “British” (imperial) produce – but the sentiment often underlay much dominion marketing. There was, in dominion marketing (Chapter 3) a tendency to present Canada, Australia and New Zealand as sylvan British-looking landscapes, with Canadian wheat-fields and New Zealand and Australian dairy farms and lamb or beef raising depicted like scenes in the English Home Counties or Midlands.  There was also the tendency to exclude both women and indigenous people (Native Americans, Aborigines, Maori) from marketing publicity. The preference was for images of sturdy, heroic-looking male farmers and ranchers. Racial (or racist) assumptions meant indigenes didn’t exist and “whiteness” was played up as a virtue. Promotional films (Chapter 4), lauding dominion produce, were widely screened in Britain, especially once the talkie era began; and it would appear that only New Zealand promotional films occasionally acknowledged the existence of indigenous people (Maori) in a few travelogues. Barnes gives a more detailed account of the “whiteness” selling-point in Chapter 5; and in Chapter 6 she deals with British marketers selling genuinely British goods and produce to the dominions and colonies.

This is a book dense with detail and requiring close reading. In spite of this, it has some dominant themes. In her Introduction, Barnes notes  “… the construction of ‘British’ Dominions through advertising remained a pernicious process. Just as recent research on nineteenth-century commodity racism argues for its covert role in upholding imperial power in colonial settings, so Dominion empire marketing belied the violence of its origins…. Marketing fruit grown in ‘British soil’ required the expropriation of Indigenous land, a process simultaneously masked and restaged in a benign fashion in commodity promotions. As a result, First Peoples became even more marginal in these carefully constructed commodity identities than they had become in their own lands….”     (p.12) Much later, she has a similar statement “… the EMB’s [Imperial Marketing Board’s] campaigns for the colonial empire could be considered almost as a paint-by-numbers study in Edward Said’s orientalism, with depictions of ‘backward’ colonies serving to cast the metropolis as their natural superior. But the exotic othering typical in the imagining such colonies could not be deployed for the Dominions who were determined that they had transcended the ‘colonial’ state. Instead, the Dominions became the mirror image of the dependent empire. This meant they too were racially inscribed, gendered spaces, though analyses that either naturalise Britishness or limit empire’s cultural impact to the production of colonial difference have helped to camouflage this effect. The EMB’s British farming hinterlands, just like those created by the Dominions themselves, constructed Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as white and masculine, separating them from the dependant empire and emphasising their metropolitan attributes anew.”  (p.127)

These statements are, of course, a verdict made in our present age. I am aware that essentially New Zealand remained Britain’s offshore farm right up to the 1960s – farmers often seen as the backbone of the nation; and sheep, wool and dairy products, mainly sent to Britain, being essential to our economy. In those circumstances, selling things as “British” was probably a reasonable strategy. But now the underlying assumptions of this strategy look tawdry and very questionable. Autres temps, autres moeurs.

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.

                      *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  

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]

 

Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.                 

                   DO NOT GO FAKING INTO THAT LONG NIGHT

A few weeks ago I saw an editorial that gave me great heart. It confirmed something I have long believed, to wit, never use dishonest euphemisms when you can say, without offence, the honest and simple truth.  The editorial was a commonsensical “Up Front” piece published in the NZ Listener, 14 January this year. It was written by a woman who has worked in hospices and who knows about the stages of dying. Her argument was that it is much better, for the health of the bereaved, to say that somebody has died rather than to use sugared words. The bereaved will adjust more easily to their loss if they are able to confront as early as possible the fact of death.

There have always been poetic or sweetened ways if saying that someone has died. “Shuffled off this mortal coil”. “Gone west”. “Gone to a better place”. People who used such phrases often did so with the best of intentions and were doubtlessly attempting to give the bereaved comfort. But euphemism has, in recent years, got out of hand. The phrase “passed away” has long been used. But in just the last few years, it has been abridged to “passed”; and as often as the broadcast news tells us that some eminent has died, so often are we told that the same person has merely “passed”. Passed by what? Passed my front door? Passed the shop down the street? Passed water? Passed wind? It is a ludicrous way of referring to death. Eminent person XYZ has not “passed”. Eminent person XYZ has died.

None of this is a counsel of rudeness. There have always been as many crass and comical way of referring to death as there have been euphemisms. “Kicked the bucket”. “Pushing up daisies” etc. Most such jocular talk has a bravado tone to it, as if the speaker wants to prove that he-or-she is not afraid of death. To ask for avoidance of euphemisms is not an invitation to refer to bereavement in a crass and hurtful way. There may be some delicate people who require the soft euphemisms before they can accept the reality of death.

All this holds true whether you are a religious person or an agnostic or an atheist – whether you believe in an afterlife or whether you believe that death is complete finality for any human being. Get used to saying she died, he died, they died. It is the reality, whatever outlook you have.

FOOTNOTE: After writing and then posting this very brief reflection, I noticed in the following issue of the Listener that a number of letters-to-the-editor fully endorsed the "Up Front" editorial. Very good to see sanity being expressed.

 

Something New

 NOTICE TO READERS - AS ALWAYS, "REID'S READER" TAKES A SUMMER BREAK OVER DECEMBER AND JANUARY.  "REID'S READER" WILL RESUME IN FEBRUARY.

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

“RODERICK FINLAYSON – a Man from Another World” by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, $NZ43); “TINY UNCERTAIN MIRACLES” by Michelle Johnston (Harper-Collins, $NZ38)

            Whenever I think of Roderick Finlayson (1904 -1992) , I think of that cynical aphorism “No good deed goes unpunished.” As I noted when reviewing Roger Hickin’s selection of Finlayson’s writings A Roderick Finlayson Reader, from the 1930s to the 1950s, Finlayson was virtually the only Pakeha who wrote sympathetically about Maori, shared the Maori way of life, did not caricature Maori, and protested regularly about the expropriation of Maori land. But as the years passed, and as Maori writers emerged, Finlayson began to be condemned as a Pakeha who shouldn’t write about Maori matters and who reported Maori speech inaccurately.

In his preface to this biography Roderick Finlayson – a Man from Another World, Roger Hickin addresses these matters directly: “While nowadays some may look upon Finlayson’s Maori stories as a form of cultural appropriation – a Pakeha presuming to write about colonised Maori as simply another manifestation of colonialism – the fact remains that most were written out of his own experience of rural Maori life several decades before Maori took up fiction-writing, and without them we (Maori included) would have a less complete and less vivid picture of Maoridom between the two world wars..” He continues: “As this is not a critical biography, still less a post-colonial assessment, I leave it to others to judge him according to post-colonial prescription. My aim has been to present Finlayson ‘in his time’. ”

            Roderick Finlayson – a Man from Another World draws very heavily on Finlayson’s own unpublished autobiographies and letters from friends and fellow writers such as Frank Sargeson, D’Arcy Cresswell, O. E. Middleton, R. A. K. Mason and others -  though as often has not Finlayson’s half of each correspondence was lost or destroyed by the recipient. Roger Hickin also quotes generously from Finlayson’s essays and fictions.

            Young Finlayson was raised in (then) working-class Ponsonby in a house of women – his mother, his grandmother and an aunt. When Roderick was a tot, his father had scarpered off to America and never returned. His mother got a divorce. The boy went first to a bad elementary school, then to Seddon Tech where, surprisingly, he liked military drill but mentally sided with the Irish in their wars of independence against England. This was at a time when virtually no Maori lived in cities. But when Finlayson was a teenager, his uncle and aunt introduced him to the Bay of Plenty, and very soon he was informally “adopted” into the family of Honi Ngawhika, of the Arawa people, and lived at Pukehina. His visits were frequent and often long. Honi Ngawhika told him “Roddy, I don’t know how it is, but I know you are not a Pakeha, Roddy. You are a Maori.” (p.29) The Depression fortified Finlayson’s respect for Maori ways of life. He began to write newspaper articles on Maori life, and in an unpublished thesis wrote “I saw a generation of the Pakeha devoured by the monster of his own making. In country and in cities hundreds, thousands, suffered defeat, ruin, abject poverty in ‘the great slump’. The Maori people, already used to poverty, lived off their communal lands and the coastal seas as they always had. Their world proved to be more enduring. As the Pakeha’s superiority waned the vitality of the Maori began to spring.” (p.31)

Was this a simplistic view? Hickin doesn’t argue the case, but it is clear that Finlayson’s long sojourns with Maori shaped his writing for the rest of his life. It is also possible that, in his twenties, Finlayson fell in love with a young Maori woman and probably hoped to marry her; but such a marriage never happened, either because the woman in question was promised elsewhere or because Finlayson’s mother would have disapproved of a “mixed” marriage. He seems to have suffered from regret over this for years.

After dropping his plans to become an architect, and after visiting Rarotonga a couple of times, Finlayson married Ruth Taylor in 1936. They were to stay married until Finlayson’s death in 1992, and were to have six children, but not without some ruptures in their relationship. And in 1937, they moved to a humble house in Weymouth, on the north side of Manukau Harbour, and lived a semi-rural life, often (at least in their early years) feeding themselves on fish and shellfish gathered from the as-yet-unpolluted harbour. And Finlayson set about writing in earnest. He also connected more frequently with Auckland’s small literary fraternity, particularly taking advice from Sargeson and Cresswell, whose criticism he took seriously as he was weened away from writing in the abstract and pointed in the direction of material reality in his stories.

Roger Hickin accounts for all Finlayson’s work, charting the genesis of each of his short-story collections and his novels (which were mainly loose and episodic in structure and could easily be read as short-stories connected). These included his first two short-story collections Brown Man’s Burden (1938), Sweet Beulah Land (1942) and the “novel” The Schooner Came to Atia (1952) – all published by Ron and Kay Holloway’s Griffin Press -  as well as the “novel” Tidal Creek, published in Australia in 1948. Finlayson was aware that some of his writing might have had succes d’estime with discerning critics, but it was not widely known. “At times Rod felt his isolation at Weymouth aggravated his lack of readership”. (p.108). He had had a nervous breakdown in 1946 when his mother died and by the mid-1950s he had a full family to provide for. For some years he made a modest income writing for the school bulletins and by the later 1950s, to make ends meet, he took a job at a municipal government printing press in central Auckland. Later he made a modest amount by writing a commissioned book about D’Arcy Cresswell for the Twayne author series.

One of the most puzzling chapters in this biography is Chapter 8, which gives an account of Finlayson’s conversion to Catholicism. The family into which he was born was (more-or-less) Presbyterian, as befits one whose ancestors were mostly Scots. The person he most consulted about taking this step was the more performative, and less modest, convert James K. Baxter, 22 years Finlayson’s junior. The puzzle is that Baxter eventually disposed of the letters Finlayson had written to him, so we have only the letters that Baxter wrote back, filled with angels and visions. Finlayson’s own thoughts about converting remain obscure. This reader also wonders how much Finlayson might have been encouraged by Ron and Kay Holloway, so often his publishers, who were also converts to Catholicism. There is another matter that Hickin broaches. He says that Finlayson, like Baxter, had “some difficulty separating agape and eros when binding the wounds of young female travellers” (p.144). Baxter’s sexual affairs are now well known. There is no evidence that Finlayson ever transgressed his marriage vows, but he appears to have been strongly attracted to one younger woman to the point of enraging his wife Ruth. She remained upset about this for many years. Connected with all this, as Roger Hickin points out, is the fact that in some of his later writings – and especially in his short-story collection Other Lovers (1976) – Finlayson dwelt on the erotic attraction of men to women.

Finlayson continued to the last to be an advocate for Maori. He supported the protests against the New Zealand Rugby Union for inviting an apartheid South African team to New Zealand in 1982. Frequently, and especially in the Catholic press, he chastised priests who did not embrace fully the papal encyclicals that advocated social justice. He and his wife did also often take in waifs and stays who seem to have lost their way or were in straitened circumstances.  But criticism of his work grew. In the late 1950s, the critic E. H. McCormack suggested that Finlayson’s accounts of Maori life “at times betrayed the author into a condescending attitude that was far removed from his intentions” (p.190). By the 1970s, Maori writers like Patricia Grace were levelling the same sort of criticism, focussing especially on what they saw as a distorted version of rural Maori speech as reported in Finlayson’ stories.

Yet, to the end, nobody criticised Finlayson as a man. His sincerity, dedication to his vision and charity were well-known. [Not referenced by Roger Hickin, it’s interesting to note that Kevin Ireland, in his 2022 poetry collection Just Like That, has a poem about attending Finlayson’s funeral in 1992 and declaring that nobody deserved more to be in heaven than Roderick.]

If I had one small criticism, it would be that this biography is very sparing in talking about Finlayson’s family. (For the record, only one of his six children followed him into Catholicism.) Any negative feelings I have about Finlayson have to do with Finlayson himself, and not with this book. Like many charitable and idealistic people, he could be naïve – as when he refused to believe that his good friend Frank Sargeson was also a procurer of [then illegal] abortions. While D’Arcy Cresswell helped him to get going as a writer, many of Cresswell’s ideas and theories were so poorly conceived that it is odd Finlayson took them so seriously. And, when it came to his own polemics, Finlayson could too easily preach a vague and untenable Utopianism. This is especially true of his 1940 pamphlet Our Life in This Land. But all this is just me nit-picking at Finlayson’s weaknesses.

Hickin has produced an admirable biography that brings us to the heart of what Finlayson was about. Well-illustrated and well-proportioned, it does the man proud. An essential New Zealand text.

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 In essence, the Australian author Michelle Johnston’s novel Tiny Uncertain Miracles is a book about hope in the face of despair.

Marick is divorced from his wife Diane and separated from his daughter Claudia as his ex-wife has custody of the girl. When his marriage broke up, he had a sort of crisis of faith. He left his job to take a degree in theology, desperately trying to find meaning in his life. But he remains a broken man, still uncertain of his faith and doubting God. “When he attempted prayer in the inked hours, his words were little more than argument.” (p.15) Worse, he is depressed and lonely. “His phone book was empty. His meals were eaten alone. It had taken the divorce to admit he had no friends of his own.” (p.22) Largely because nobody else will take the job, Marick accepts the post of chaplain in a large hospital. His job is to comfort the sick, the dying and the bereaved, even though his heart is not fully in the job. Officially Anglican, yet really half-way towards being agnostic, Marick is not ordained, but patients still assume he is a priest and routinely call him “Father”.

All this may seem bleak, yet Michelle Johnston injects a certain buoyancy in her prose. Despite everything, Marick is a perceptive man and the balance of faith and scepticism makes him very observant as he questions everything. His humour may be sour, but it is humour nevertheless. And there is much for him to question – for down in the basement of the hospital works Hugo, a microbiologist who is secretly conducting experiments on bacteria. He believes the bacteria he is treating are generating gold. Pure metallic gold. When he invites Marick to look through his microscope, Marick is sure he sees gold too. So do some eminent academics in the institution where Hugo once worked. Is this charlatanry and bogus alchemy? Or is this a miracle?

Like me, you might at once think that this conjuration of gold is one of the “tiny uncertain miracles” of the title, and certainly Marick’s involvement with Hugo’s experiment is one of the main threads of plot. But Michelle Johnston is much more subtle than that. We may eventually get an explanation of Hugo’s work (I don’t give any spoilers here), but as the story progresses, we understand that the real “tiny uncertain miracles” are Marick’s interactions with other people that bring him back to life. Friendship, understanding , the need he has for others and the need others have for him bring him bit my bit back to a qualified happiness. It might be his casual joking relationship with the hospital’s cheery front-of-house woman Dolly. It may be his insight into other people’s flawed marriage when he befriends and dines with Hugo and his wife Vivian – and sees the strife that often occurs between them. It may be his search for renewed love. It may even be his awareness that, despite his doubts, his prayers with the sick, dying and bereaved are actually doing them some good. His life is neither useless nor pointless.

Does this sound simplistic and Pollyanna-ish? I hope not. It takes a long time for Marick to reach his reawakening. Michelle Johnston structures her novel in alternating chapters, where we get Marick’s “present” life in one chapter and flashbacks to Marick’s disintegrating marriage in the next. Marick’s problems with his wife Diane are both credible and wrenching and the novel’s final optimism is earned only after much real strife. While the novel’s denouement is positive, it is hard-won.

The blurb tells me that Michelle Johnston, as well as being a novelist, is an emergency physician and a Staff Specialist at the Royal Perth Hospital Emergency Department. Her vivid account of how a hospital works, the daily crises the emergency staff have to face, the trauma that has to be dealt with, the unexpected and extreme cases, the black humour doctors sometimes adopt to buoy themselves up - all this can only have been gleaned from the author’s own experience. It’s very believable.