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 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 18^th 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.

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.  

                                            SACRED OR SECULAR?

Pardon me if I begin with a personal anecdote.

Some years ago, I was at a university capping ceremony in which one of my daughters was about to be capped for an advanced degree. As was often the case, an eminent person had been chosen to give an opening speech, intended to inspire the proud graduands to benefit society with their new-won skills and knowledge. It happened that the invited speaker was a learned Pasifika scholar and clergyman. The core of his speech was that life could not be lived well without God; and one’s endeavours would be fruitless without God. In effect, he delivered a sermon.

As I recall it, the speaker was politely clapped and there was no protest or interjection at this very Christian speech, even if the occasion was a secular one – after all, most graduands tend to regard capping speeches as something to be politely endured and/or ignored as they wait for their big moment of having their degrees publicly confirmed. But I couldn’t help entertaining an heretical thought. Would the reaction have been different if the speech had been given by a Pakeha bishop or a Rabbi, each expressing support for specific religious teachings? How much was the speech accepted politely as a courtesy to Pasifika and Polynesian culture in general?

As in many other democratic countries, we have a rather odd dichotomy in New Zealand. Officially, public events are secular, but “secular” is a very contested term. Does secularism mean neutrality (and silence) when it comes to matters of religion, so that believers (of all denominations and religions) and non-believers are on an equal footing? Or does secularism mean hostility towards religion, which is frequently the case with people who style themselves as secularists, as often seen in Australia’s Secular Lobby? We have seen some of these tensions in recent initiatives to change the nature of the prayer that has, for many decades, been read out by the Speaker of the House at the opening of a new session of parliament.

At the beginning of December (2022) there was a local controversy pitting the religious and the secular. Craig Jepson, the newly-elected mayor of Kaipara, refused to allow a Maori councillor to open the council’s first meeting with a Karakia (variously defined as a prayer or liturgical chant). Jepson asserted that the meeting was a secular one and therefore it was no place for religious expression of any sort. This caused outrage for many in the local community, especially as there is a large Maori population in the Kaipara area. A petition was raised against Jepson, there was a large – and peaceful – protest march in Dargaville, and the Race Relations Commissioner expressed his concern over Jepson’s action. At time of writing these comments,  Jepson (a Pakeha) has not retracted his assertion, but has suggested that there could be a roster allowing councillors of different persuasions to open meetings with a reflection.

At this point, I have to declare my bias and say where I am situated in this dispute. Jepson’s intervention and the halting of the Karakia were recorded and shown on national television. Jepson’s action struck me as boorish, inept and bullying. No matter how strongly he felt about it, he could have let the Karakia finish before expressing his opinion. I also have to add that on the whole, I’m on the side of a formal opening prayer of some sort to begin council deliberations.

But here’s my awkward question. How many of those who criticised Jepson publicly are themselves not religious believers? I’m guessing (and only guessing) that many Pakeha who criticised Jepson would not have supported an opening prayer to a council meeting if it were not Maori. The difference is that in this case a Karakia is seen as a vital part of a certain ethnicity – something to be treasured as a people’s heritage. In other words, at least some non-religious Pakeha (again I’m merely speculating) would have said public prayer is okay for one ethnicity but not for another. And just possibly there is something patronising in such a stance. It’s as if we are being told that the prayers of one group are to be cherished while the prayers of another are to be regarded with contempt.

  

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.

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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]

 

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.