‘Biography and history’ by Barbara Caine

2010,  124p & notes

This is only a small book and would have fitted well into that ” Very Short Introduction to ….” series put out by Oxford University Press.  As it is, it is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s series on ‘Theory and History’ which aims at introducing undergraduate students to themes like transnationalism, gender, narrative, postmodernism etc. and history.   It is very clearly written, and while the experience of reading it is enhanced if you are familiar with some of the biographies that she describes (as I am) , it stands in its own right as a review of the methodological and narrative questions raised by the relationship between history and biography.

Barbara Caine was Professor of History at Monash University and is now at the University of Sydney.  Many academics working in biography come from the literary studies area, rather than history.  Her projects and publications testify to her long and deep experience with biography, autobiography and history, and the ways to approach an individual life as an exercise in historical methodology.

‘Ancient Light’ by John Banville

2012, 245 p.

To be honest, I wonder if I’m clever enough to read John Banville.  I’ve read other books of his and admire his smoothness, his archness, his reflexivity and most of all, the control he has over his writing.  It seems that recently I’ve been reading books which, though enjoyable, are a bit flabby and undisciplined.  Banville’s neither of these things.   I’m increasingly feeling that transitions are the litmus test of good writing, and Banville can shape up a long chapter and switch between time periods and plot lines almost without you noticing. He’s good.

There are two main narrative lines in this book.  The narrator is Alexander Cleave, in the autumn of his acting career who has unexpectedly been called up to make a film “The Invention of the Past” about Alex Vander, based on a script written by J. B.  He is rather flattered and surprised to be approached for the part, but his mind is really not on the film.  His adult daughter has committed suicide some time earlier and he can hardly bear to think about it, so his mind skitters off to other thoughts.

Instead, he reminisces about the affair he conducted as a teenaged boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland with his best friend’s mother.  He calls her Mrs. Gray throughout the book, as they indulge in furtive couplings in the laundry and in the midst of the fug of domesticity, and in a rundown cottage in the woods.  You know that they are going to be caught eventually: he tells you as much, and so each time he goes back to describing the illicit gropings and the fervent pumpings, you feel quite nervous for them both.

Banville switches between the two narratives quite effortlessly, while undercutting your faith in the fidelity of the narrator’s memories.  Alexander himself admits that the memories are probably wrong: he has the impression that it was raining during a particular event when he knows that it was a hot and dusty day instead; the details are somehow skewed in his memories and he can’t quite work out what’s wrong with them.  Banville has been leaving hints throughout the book that Alexander can’t be trusted, and finally when Alexander mentions Gary Fonda in The Grapes of Noon I eventually acknowledged that, despite his urbane demeanour and smooth narration, Alexander is a very unreliable narrator.

But that’s not the only thing that made me feel rather stupid in reading this book.  His daughter’s suicide was obviously fundamental to the story, and yet it seemed such an underdeveloped plot line.  In the back of my mind I had something about Cass and a suicide into the ocean below a castle…and Alex Vander, he sounded familiar…  Was there something that I should know that I didn’t?

Well, yes.  This book is actually part of a trilogy and I’ve even read the other two books without realizing that they were all related!!! In fact, I didn’t realize it at all: I had to read it in reviews of the book by people who are obviously more astute than I am. The allusions to the other books and the reflexivity on Banville’s own performance as a writer and puppet master were being piled up higher and higher at the end of the book- and because he is the brilliant writer that he is, they didn’t  sink the whole endeavour as they would in less skilled hands.

Then there’s the vocabulary! I’m no slouch vocabulary-wise but I’d never heard of ‘brumous air’ ‘caducous leaves’ etc. etc. I started writing them down to look up later, but there were too many.  Doesn’t matter- it’s good for me to realize that someone has a vocabulary that far, far outstrips mine.  I wonder if Banville actually has those words in his consciousness all the time, or whether he’s playing a game of word one-upmanship here.

So, while this book made me feel rather abashed and stupid when I finally realized what was going on, I did enjoy it.  The story of the obsession and selfishness of young love stands on its own two feet and doesn’t even really need the other Alexander/Alex Vander  thread at all. Ah, but then it wouldn’t be a Banville, would it?

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I wanted to read a book with chops.

‘Sarah Thornhill’ by Kate Grenville

2012, 304 p.

An author writing a book that is part of a series has to write for two audiences.  The second and later books of a series need to stand alone for readers who are coming to it without having read the other books, and yet those who have read the other books will look for, and hopefully find, larger themes that carry across the work as a whole.

Sarah Thornhill is the final book in what is known as Grenville’s ‘Colonial’ Trilogy.  It picks up the story of William Thornhill that Kate Grenville explored in the first of the trilogy, The Secret River, published in 2005.  William Thornhill, a lighterman on the Thames had been transported to NSW in 1806 for theft, and after his sentence had  been commuted ‘took up’ land  on the Hawkesbury River, with all the consequences for the original inhabitants that such an innocuous term as ‘took up’ elides.

The second book of the trilogy, The Lieutenant  steps even further back in time to the years immediately following the First Fleet, which arrived in 1788. It is based on William Dawes, the astronomer, and his friendship with a young Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang.

This final book in the trilogy returns to the Thornhill family and is told by Sarah Thornhill, William’s youngest daughter who was born in 1816 in the colony as a ‘currency lass’.  She knows no other home

They called us the Colony of New South Wales.  I never liked that.  We wasn’t new anything.  We was ourselves. (p. 3)

This sense of this new, native-born generation of British Australians being ‘themselves’ is captured beautifully in this book.  John Molony has written about this generation in his book The Native Born (Google preview here) and in Portia Robertson’s work The Hatch and Brood of Time.

One of the real triumphs of this book is the narrative voice that Grenville has crafted in her character Sarah.  She is illiterate but quick, and her voice is ungrammatical and conversational.  It is not an act of ventriloquism like Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, but instead she echoes the cadences and slips of the spoken conversation of an unlettered woman, talking to someone she knows well.

At heart, it is a love story.  Sarah grows up alongside and loves Jack Langland, the son of a white man and an aboriginal mother who is marginally accepted by the white settlers in the surrounding district.  But when Sarah, as a white woman, declares her love for Jack, she runs into the intolerance and cast-iron proprieties of white society and the relationship ends abruptly.  Heartbroken, she marries  the settler John Daunt as a second-best, and gradually comes to love him.  If the book does nothing else, it tells this story well.

But Grenville has another purpose in this trilogy as well.  She has clearly identified ‘reconciliation’ as one of her driving passions in her life as well as in her writing, and I think that it’s the theme that holds the three books in this trilogy together.  The first book grapples with the question of how a good man does terrible things; the second wonders whether there wasn’t another way; this third asks, what can we do if it can’t be mended.  Sarah (and Grenville’s?) answer is to tell the story; say what you know.

How will I ever find a way to tell everything that brought me here?…Of those things left undone that ought to have done, and those things done that we ought not to have done?

Rippling away into all those lives, down along the fathers and daughters and granddaughters. Generation after generation, the things joining us and the things cutting between us.  All made by something done so long ago….If there was anything I could do to mend things, I’d do them…. I’m never going to be able to tell what it was all about… I can only tell what I know. Cruelties and crimes, miseries on every side.  But of all the crimes done, the worst would be to let the story slip away.  For what it’s worth, mine had best take its place, in with all theothers (p 313, 304)

If you follow the public conversation about the nexus between Australian literature and Australian history at all, you will know of the controversy over The Secret River  between Grenville as author and the historians Inga Clendinnen and Mark McKenna.   Grenville’s take on the controversy can be found here on her own website.  She notes in the introduction that she had previously removed this response from the site, but was constantly asked for copies of it.  So, at the risk of giving oxygen to it again, she replaced it on the site.

I do not at all have a problem with authors having a larger message, a deeper purpose, or a moral, political and intellectual impetus for driving for their work. I do have a problem, though, when it warps the logic of the narrative, and I think that this happens here.  Quite simply, I found the ending of the book implausible in terms of the range of behaviours open socially to the characters in the mores of the time and  I was not convinced by the drive that impelled their action.

Nor do I completely believe Grenville’s insistence that the beat-up belongs in oblivion.  In a cheeky little ‘last word’ right at the start, she has an epigraph.

It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.

And where does this come from?  None other than E. H. Carr’s What is History? p. 21.

Some other responses I’ve enjoyed.

Marilyn at Me, you, and books.  http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/sarah-thornhill-by-kate-grenville/

Lisa at ANZLitLovers  http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/03/25/sarah-thornhill-by-kate-grenville/

Alison Ravencroft’s Meanjin article http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/the-strangeness-of-the-dance-kate-grenville-rohan-wilson-inga-clendinnen-and-kim-scott/

My rating: 7.5 /10

Read because: it was my book group’s selection for March 2013.

Sourced from: CAE book groups

‘Redcoat’ by Richard Holmes

422 p. & notes, 2001

I spent all of Anzac Day and most of the following day reading about soldiers.  Not Australian ones, but British ones.  I was originally spurred to read this book by a question in my mind about the wives of officers in the British Army, but I then realized that British regiments have been just off-stage in the three British colonies that I’ve been studying (Upper Canada, British Guiana, New South Wales).  In fact, they’ve been ON the stage all along but I just haven’t been looking there.

Richard Holmes is one of my favourite biographers- as you can tell here and here. This book, however,  is written by the OTHER Richard Holmes- the military history one (who died in 2011) .  But his opening page certainly started well, and could well have been written by ‘my’ other literary-biography Richard Holmes:

He has not shaved this morning.  And from the look of things he shaved neither yesterday nor the day before.  Ginger stubble sprouts from a sun-tanned face, with red-rimed blue eyes and a mouth whose teeth stand anyhow, like a line of newly raised militia…. His name is Ezekial Hobden, Hobden to officers, NCOs and most private soldiers but Zeke to a favoured few….(p. 3)

Military history is most definitely not my favourite genre.  I dislike the deference, the lionizing of ‘great’ men,  the pernickity attention to details about battles and uniforms and regiments,  and the “well done those men!” tone of it all.  But as Holmes says in his preface

This is not a book about great, or even non-so-great generals, though both feature in it from time to time.  And it is not about battles either, even if we are rarely very far away from them.  Instead, its concern is for the  raw material of generalship and the pawns of battle, the regimental officers and soldiers, (and their wives, sweethearts and followers of a less defined and sometimes rather temporary status) that served in the British army in a century when it painted the world red. p. Xv.

Holmes makes no secret of his admiration for the British Army- he even declares his love (and he uses that word) for  “its sheer, dogged, awkward, bloody-minded endurance.”  The army he describes in this book existed with relatively little change between 1760 and the eve of World War I.  It had two functions: the continental one, with an emphasis on formalism in drill and dress and the scientific aspects of warcraft, and a colonial function where practicality outranked precedent, and dress and discipline were looser.  It is this colonial British Army that I have been encountering in my studies without quite acknowledging it.  Holmes examines both threads of the British Army, both at home and in deployments in the American War of Independence, the Peninsular campaign, in India and particularly the Indian Mutiny and finally in the Crimea.

His emphasis is on the experience of the officers and soldiers of the British Army, rather than the battles as such.  He speaks of recruiting,  food, clothing, camaraderie, punishment, equipment, wounds and drunkenness.  It is a particularly human account, with only one section on weaponry and its use in battle that had me squirming a bit and wondering why I was reading it.  He relies heavily on memoirs from soldiers of all ranks and campaigns, and there’s humour in there, alongside the waste, the waste, the waste.  We meet several of his soldiers again and again in different chapters- perhaps he could have had an appendix at the end to remind his readers of who they were when you met them again. But perhaps they’re better left as living, talking men in their memoirs, rather than a cut-and-dried obituary.  In fact, he says something like this in his closing pages:

There are moments when a memorial has come as an unexpected shock, for the man it commemorates has featured prominently in the memoirs that have formed so much a part of my working life for the past two years and, ridiculously, I know, it is hard to think of him as being dead. (p. 420)

This is a strangely emotional book for a military history with  humour and love written into it.  I enjoyed it a great deal.

‘Sufficient Grace’ by Amy Espeseth

2012, 322p.

The cover of this book is well chosen: stark twigs against whiteness, tracked with blood.  The novel is set in the deep frozen woods of Wisconsin, where the narrator 13 year old Ruth lives in with her extended family in a Pentecostal fundamentalist community.  There are secrets and sin in this community, and the children of the family are victims and increasingly, co-keepers of these secrets.

Although the book is set in the recent past where young girls can wear moon-boots and  attend the local school, theirs is a claustrophobic, simple life without television and consumer goods, resonant of a nineteenth century existence.  Hunting, fishing and farming are fundamental to their lifestyle, and they are closely attuned to the passing of seasons and their relationship with the food they eat- the changes in the ice, the viscerality of hunting, the harvesting and husbandry of the earth.  The family live close by to each other and worship together, with the exception of Uncle Peter, who is estranged from the religion that binds the rest of the family together in such suffocating ties.

The narrative is set over five months, with each month forming a separate section of the book and it is told in Ruth’s voice and from her perspective.  Ruth is a watcher, hiding in cupboards and under tables, and while in a way she sees much more than her religion-blinded relatives, she also does not completely understand what she is seeing.  As readers, we see before she does.  Her narrative is supplemented by the  hymns that shape her world view, and their simple God-based certainties of their lyrics highlight further the sweaty, murky fug of human relationships inside cabins and barns, with the stark and chilled landscape outside.

This is a layered world, with fundamentalist Christianity laid over an earlier dalliance with Amish religion; with Native American and Norwegian heritage lying underneath as well.  Ruth’s cousin Naomi has been adopted from the nearby Native American mission and Ruth’s grandmother too has Native American heritage that her children largely ignore, covered as it is by her deep religious faith.

I was very impressed with the sheer confidence with which this book is written.  Much of this might spring from the author’s own life, which largely mirrors Ruth’s experience. Her descriptions are poised and beautiful, and in her creation of Ruth’s voice she combines the majesty of the King James Bible and the shy, naive knowingness and yet innocence of a young girl approaching womanhood, uncomfortable in her body, and already blinkered to other options in the world outside.  The title is taken from Corinthians 12:9

And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.”

This is not an amazing grace; instead it is a stripped down one- merely sufficient. The biblical reference is apt because at its heart this is a story about power and weakness.  At times the biblical allusions threaten to engulf the story- the Ruth/Naomi pairing; Samuel as the much wanted child and prophet etc- but there is enough weight in the descriptions of landscape, the all-encompassing faith and the murkiness of sin to balance the biblical metaphors out.

This book won the Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2009, long listed for the Stella Prize and  short listed for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.

My rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: it was long-listed for the Stella.

‘Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered’ by John McLaren

2011, 303 p plus notes

John McLaren ‘Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial 1800-1900′.

The title Dewigged, Bothered, and Bewildered is a play on the show-tune with a similar title, (Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered). It examines the careers of several 19^th century judges of the British Empire who, for various reasons, found themselves removed or ‘dewigged’ from their positions.  The title reflects the tone of this book- light and jocular at times- but it belies the sheer breadth of knowledge of individual colonies that it covers.   Its author, John McLaren, is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria (Canada)  and as Bruce Kercher’s endorsement on the back cover says “John McLaren is the only person I know with sufficiently broad legal historical knowledge to attempt such a huge task, and he succeeds at it remarkably well”.

It  might seem strange that a book about 19^th century judges  starts with an analysis of judicial tenure in the seventeenth century.  It was during the constitutional maelstrom of Charles  and James and the Glorious Revolution that two competing mechanisms for appointing and controlling judges emerged.  The ‘Cokeian’ model, associated with Sir Edward Coke, drew on the rhetoric of the Ancient Constitution and the ‘rights of freeborn Englishmen’ to  argue that the King, like other mortals, was subject to the law, and that he and his officers were subject to the jurisdiction of the stewards of the Common Law, the judges of the King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer.  The rival ‘Baconian’ model, expounded by Lord Francis Bacon, emphasized the Divine Right of Kings and emphasized that judges must be the loyal servants of the monarch.  Hence, under the Cokeian model, judges should be employed ‘during good behaviour’ where, as long as there was not actual judicial impropriety, the judges were independent of the Crown.  The Baconian model, on the other hand, employed judges “at His Majesty’s pleasure” and kept the judges under the control of the King and his government.

All this might seem far removed from a judge in Port Phillip, Sierra Leone, Newfoundland or Upper Canada 150 years later, but McLaren argues that this 17^th century argument about the independence of the judges, abuses of power by the government,  and local control over the judiciary was played out  over again, this time in the colonies.  In this book, McLaren uses group biography to examine how these battles were exemplified through the careers of a number of colonial judges from Upper Canada, New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, Sierra Leone, Newfoundland and the West Indies.

Judge Willis has a starring role here: we meet him in the opening pages, and he is featured in two chapters.  He is, however, not the only judge in this book who appears as a trouble maker in two separate colonies.  Jeffrey Bent, well known in Australia for his struggles with Macquarie, reappeared in Grenada, where he again clashed with the governor.  Robert Thorpe, who was a ‘radical’ judge in Upper Canada prior to Willis’ appointment, also had trouble in Sierra Leone, and Sir John Gorrie seemed to be shifted from place to place when he fell out with various people in Fiji, the Leeward Islands  and  Trinidad.  There are a number of troublesome judges whose travails were restricted to one colony alone: Boothby in South Australia; Sewell and Monk in Lower Canada; Montagu in Van Diemen’s Land; Beaumont in British Guiana.

The chapters are arranged thematically, but chronologically and geographically as well. For example, the chapter ‘Courting Reform in a Counter-Revolutionary Empire 1800-1831’ deals with Robert Thorpe and Judge Willis in Upper Canada, where the judges’ reforming zeal clashed with conservative local interests.  It is followed by a chapter that makes the argument in the opposite direction for other British North American colonies  ‘Ultra Conservative Judges in an Era of Developing Reformist Sentiment in the British Empire 1810-1840’.  It covers similar years to the first chapter, but this time switches the focus around.  It  examines the  cases  of Sewell and Monk in Lower Canada and Henry Boulton in Newfoundland,  where conservative judges fled  the radical colonies for the protection of the home government.

Chapters 6-8 are focussed on Australian examples.  Chapter 6 ‘Guarding the Sanctity of the Common Law from Local ‘Deviations’ in Convict Colony 1800-1830’ examines the career of Ellis and Jeffrey Bent in New South Wales, followed by Ch 7 ‘English Legal Culture and the Repugnancy Card in the Australian Colonies 1830-1850’ which follows on chronologically in examining Montagu and Pedder in Van Diemens Land, and Willis in Port Phillip.  The term ‘repugnancy’ refers to the tenet that colonial law should not contradict English law.  Part of a colonial judge’s role involved analysing local laws drawn up in the colony and advising the governor whether the law was ‘repugnant’ or not.  Chapter 8 takes up the repugnancy question in Australia after 1850 with Benjamin Boothby in South Australia.

Chapters 9 and 10 examine judges in the slavery colonies in the West Indies and West Africa, with George Smith in Trinidad,  Thorpe in Sierra Leone and Jeffrey Bent in Granada between 1800-1830 in Chapter 9.   In Chapter 10 the time frame shifts to 1834-1900 with Joseph Beaumont in British Guiana and Sir John Gorrie in Mauritius, Fiji and Trinidad.

The final chapter draws together themes that emerge throughout the stories.  In a way, this chapter subverts, or at least challenges, the structural logic of the other chapters because some of these judges, Willis in particular, are not easy to pigeonhole.

As McLaren points out, it is important that troublesome, contrary, complex and contradictory judges should not be committed to “the ashcan of historical ephemera”.  We gain a view of empire from them that is not available from ‘don’t rock the boat’ jurists, and we must never lose sight of the fact that law is never a sideshow. Instead, it was an important instrument in the extension of imperial authority, infused with and supported by the constitutional and legal values of the English-speaking world of the previous two centuries. (p. 273, 274)

It is the PhD student’s nightmare that a highly prominent, esteemed and widely published academic release a book on one’s very topic while you are still working on- or worse, just as you finish-  your thesis.  I became aware of John’s work while I’ve been working on Willis myself, and it was with a mixture of trepidation and curiosity that I read his book.  I gained much from it, particularly in being able to compare Willis with other judges in similar situations, and it’s with relief that I can see where my own  more  bottom-up work can fit under his broad umbrella of judicial misbehaviour and discipline.

A group biography, like this one, has challenges beyond that of the individual biography.  There’s a danger that so many situations and people are introduced that the whole thing breaks down in confusion, but there’s also the advantage of being able to better define the exceptional.  I think that a sign that McLaren has succeeded so well is that on encountering a particular judge a second or even third time, there is a rush of recognition.  His judicial characters are so well drawn that when the final chapter draws together observations from across the work as a whole, there is no need to check back to see ‘now, who’s he again?’  The book is suffused with a lightness of touch and a sure grasp of the contours of so many different colonies that comes from the author’s long, deep immersion in colonial legal history.

‘Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life’ by Jerome Bruner

Good grief, I thought- is Jerome Bruner still alive? I remember reading his work  back in my educational designer days.  But there he was, in 2002 at the age of 87,  giving the first Lezioni Italiane of the new millenium- a lecture delivered at the University of Bologna by a foreign visitor on a topic of his or her choosing.

2002, 107 p. & notes

The lectures formed the basis of this book and although they might not say anything new, they form a distillation of Bruner’s life-long fascination with narrative and its relation to identity and literature. According to his webpage, Jerome Bruner in 2011 (by then aged 96) was still recorded as a Senior Research Fellow in Law at New York University.  Although at first glance this seems an odd position for a cognitive psychologist and educationalist,  in this book he brings together the idea of story and the law.

The book consists of four chapters, each about 25 pages in length.  I’m not sure if he gave four separate lectures, but certainly these chapters, with their discursive and yet easily-followed narrative thread, read  as if they might have been self-contained presentations at some time.

In Chapter 1 “The Uses of Story” he commences by noting that we are all adept at narrative, which is almost as natural as language itself.  Stories commence with a breach in the expected  or peripeteia- a sudden reverse in circumstance, and the tension between what was expected and what came to pass. The story goes on to explore efforts to cope or come to terms with this breach and its consequences. A story often closes with a coda, a retrospective evaluation of what it all means.

In the second chapter of the book “The Legal and the Literary”  he turns his attention to legal stories, told before a court of law within a tight set of procedures that keeps them within recognized bounds.  Such stories, when told by lawyers for the prosecution or defence, are always partisan and adversarial, but it is our confidence in the legal process that sanitizes them.

The law has evolved over the centuries not only to render just and legitimate verdicts between two opposing narratives but to do so in a way that removes the risk of precipitating a cycle of revenge after the verdict has been pronounced.  To achieve this dual objective, the courts must be accepted as authoritative and legitimate, and they must also be seen as fair and disinterested, capable of rising above the self-serving and adversarial narratives by which cases are presented. (p. 37)

As with other stories, legal stories are also based on peripeteia.  The tension between what is possible and what is established is built into the texture of Anglo-Saxon common law.  The common-law writ is itself a plot summary of an actionable offence against what is customary and established. (p. 58).

He then turns to literature, even though courts and judges would bristle at the thought that law and literature could be coupled together in this way. He distinguishes literature from other forms of story in the intent that lies behind the fashioning of a literary narrative.  Legal stories aim at making the world self-evident, whereas literature evokes familiar life with the deliberate aim of disturbing our expectations.

The challenge of literary narrative is to open possibilities without diminishing the seeming reality of the actual (p. 48)

The third chapter “The Narrative Construction of Self” turns to the role of story in our telling of our self to our self. He argues that there is no such thing as an intuitively obvious and essential self, sitting there ready to be portrayed into words.

Rather, we constantly construct and reconstruct our selves to meet the needs of the situations we encounter and we do so with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopes and fears for the future.  Telling oneself about oneself is like making up a story about who and what we are, what’s happened, and why we’re doing what we’re doing. (p. 64)

This self-telling accumulates over time and is patterned on the conventional genres privileged by our specific culture.  The narrative we create about our self must create a conviction of autonomy where we have a will of our own, but it also has to be related to a world of others- our family, friends, institutions and the past.   He notes that most autobiographies and self-tellings have turning points, which are themselves influenced by culture. He suggests that once a person becomes unable to tell a narrative (through, for example, Alzheimers or Korsakov syndrome) then they have virtually lost self-hood.

The final chapter ‘So why narrative?’ returns to the themes of the earlier chapters. We see more of Bruner the academic here, as he explores the anthropological origins of the ability to tell stores, and the features of language that make it possible.  He cites one of my favourite books on language, Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words which examines the language practices of white and negro children in North Carolina and the way that education privileges the “just the facts, ma’am” narrative structures of white children over the imaginatively elaborated tales of white children.  He closes with a discussion of the importance of narrative in medicine and rehabilitation.

I’m not quite sure yet what I’m going to do with this and how I’m going to use it in my own work.  I’m thinking about narrative and the ways of telling a life …but I haven’t quite worked my thinking out in my own head yet.  I’ll leave with a paragraph that I think sums up Bruner’s argument across these four lectures:

For better or worse, it [narrative] is our preferred, perhaps even our obligatory medium for expressing human aspirations and their vicissitudes, our own and those of others.  Our stories also impose a structure, a compelling reality on what we experience, even a philosophical stance.  By their very nature, stories take for granted that their protagonists are free unless ensnared by circumstances.  They also take for granted that people know what the world is like, what can be expected of it, as well as what it expected of them.  In time, life comes not so much to imitate art as to join with it.  It is “ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places for ordinary reasons”.  A seeming breach of this ordinariness is required to trigger the rich dynamic of narrative- how to  cope with it, to domesticate it, to get things back on a familiar track. (p. 89)….Story making is our medium for coming to terms with the surprises and oddities of the human condition and for coming to terms with our imperfect grasp of that condition. (p. 90)

As it happens, I’ve just found a lecture based on this book and echoing its title given  by Inga Clendinnen who is right up the top of my Favourite Historians list.  The lecture, ‘Making Stories, Telling Tales: Life, Literature and Law’ was delivered as the 18th Lionel Murphy Memorial Lecture in 2004 and the transcript is available here.  It’s a wonderful presentation that references this book, Janet Malcolm the biographer, Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation . It’s beautifully crafted, as Clendinnen’s work always is, and well worth reading.

‘From Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story’ by Pamela Burton

2010,  401 p. & notes

I think that most of us would be hard pressed to name the judges on the High Court of Australia- I know that I would be.  Occasionally a judge ‘cuts through’ into the mainstream- Michael Kirby comes to mind (perhaps even more since retiring from the bench than while on it?), as does William Deane (although probably more as Governor General than judge)- and Mary Gaudron is another.  Mary Gaudron was the first female High Court judge in Australia- just one of the many firsts in her career.  As the title of this book highlights, she was one of the judges involved in the Mabo decision, arguably one of the most important judicial decisions in Australian history (although- fascinating parlour game- no cheating on Google- who were the other judges in the Mabo case???)

‘Like a House on Fire’ by Cate Kennedy

2012, 277 p.

Like a House on Fire is a book of short stories.  If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you’ll know what’s going to come next.  I’m going to say that I don’t know how to talk about a collection of short stories.  That I don’t know how to read them- one at a time and feeling short-changed, or moving on to the next one and feeling bloated.  That they finish before I have time to engage at any level with the character.  That I just don’t like them.

Well, none of that is true with this book.

Perhaps, after 15 years of being able to indulge my love of reading more fully, I have finally learned how to read a short story.  My discovery: one story at a time ONLY , then go on to read a non-fiction book instead. The  single story has enough space to expand; it’s not squashed down to fit the next one in.

Or perhaps, these are very, very good short stories.  They have all been published elsewhere in journals and magazines as is often the case in compilations like this. Every single one of them is memorable, and for me that’s a big thing.  All too often I find myself reading the next story in a collection because the last one has been too insubstantial: the term ‘meh’ fits exactly.

But with these stories, each one is memorable in its own right, and I found myself recognizing their truths in other places.  The story ‘Five Dollar Family’, for example, where a new young mother, exhausted, drained,  looks to her dead-beat young partner and is stiffened into resolve to move beyond him- surely I saw the story lived out in an episode of ‘The Midwives’ a few weeks ago where a young single mother in Manchester likewise grew up, almost before your eyes, through the act of giving birth.  Or the story ‘Cake’ where a new mother returns to work for the first day, torn by the act of leaving her child at creche, feeling as if she is play-acting a pre-baby life that she has moved beyond- even if you haven’t been in that situation, I think we’ve all felt the way that  workplace routine comes a sepia filmreel, a nothingness, after some big, life-changing event.

Many of these stories involve bodies: most particularly women’s bodies and medical intervention-  the night before a breast biopsy; the waiting room before a miscarriage is diagnosed. Others are told from a male or a child’s perspective.  The story which gives the collection its title is about a young father with back-ache and it is so well told that you find yourself arching your own back in response, while at the same time suppressing the suspicion that he’s exaggerating.  The opening story, ‘Flexion’  which takes in  a longer timespan that many of the other slice-of-life stories in this collection do, traces a wife’s ambivalent response as her leathered, laconic farmer husband recovers after a tractor accident.

For me, it says a lot that I can flip through the book, glimpse the title at the top of the page and instantly recall what the story was about.  I don’t think that I’ve ever enjoyed a collection of short stories so much.  I wouldn’t feel in the least disgruntled or short changed should it win the Stella Prize for which it has been short-listed.

My rating: 9.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: it was long listed for the Stella Prize.  Reviewed for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013

‘Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies’ by W. L. Burn

If you had placed this book into a shiny new coloured cover, I would never have picked it for being written in 1937.  It has all the things that I look for in histories that are being written around me today:   exploration of big themes through grounded, personalized examples; a sense of place;  careful attention to detail through the sources; an attempt to step up out of those same sources into a more literary style; decisiveness in coming to a pithy conclusion,  and a judicious use of the presence of the historian him/herself as researcher and commentator.

It’s also a book that attracts my interest as a politically engaged citizen concerned about what a former Prime Minister described as “the greatest moral challenge” of our time- climate change.  In reading about the abolition of slavery I’ve been again and again reminded of the parallels between the two.  Both climate change and the abolition of slavery involve/d self-inflicted economic pain for a higher long-term purpose; both involve/d  well-organized pressure groups with powerful media access; both provoke/d  fears that international competitiveness would be hampered; both campaigns stretch/ed out  over decades.  It may well be that climate change policy, like abolition, may have to accept a compromised ‘solution’  in the short-term as part of a bigger, long-term picture- although of course, in climate change  the earth and the systems of its climate will follow their own trajectory, whatever the politics.  In the case of the abolition of slavery, the compromise was the Apprenticeship System.