‘Demon Copperhead’ by Barbara Kingsolver

2022, 546 p.

Before I read this book I already knew that Barbara Kingsolver wrote it as a homage and 21st century take on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Kingsolver’s book at 548 pages is certainly seen as a ‘big baggy monster’ by today’s standards, but because I am a complete glutton for punishment I read the original David Copperfield as well, and you can see my review here.

I’m so pleased that I read the original before I read Demon Copperfield because, even though Kingsolver’s book stands on its own two feet perfectly well, I enjoyed seeing parallels between the two books, and how she gave the events of the original book a 21st century twist. Quite amazingly, I think, these allusions to the original (which would only be obviously to readers who had read it) did not propel the modern book into farce or melodrama, which a homage to a 19th century, somewhat dated, book could easily do. Instead, they made perfect sense within a modern context.

In Dickens’ time, child labour blighted the childhoods of children. In the 21st century, drug addiction blights the children of users, who often end up using themselves. Vicious and avaricious stepfathers and childbirth deaths could orphan a child in the past: now it is overdoses, particularly of prescription drugs like Oxycontin which spring from, and in turn, corrupt the medical/pharmaceutical/crime network that have made them the scourge they are in America. (Thank God and successive Australian Governments for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and drug detection schemes that have prevented the same thing happening in Australia). The original David Copperfield was left to the mercy of unscrupulous employers: Demon Copperhead was the plaything of a welfare bureaucracy that worked more to the interests of unscrupulous ‘care’-givers playing the system for profit. Sport and his ability to draw became Demon’s means of escape.

The Wikipedia page for Demon Copperhead shows the pairing of original characters with Kingsolver’s characters. The names have resonances, but the judgements you make of them as a reader do differ. Dori (Dickens’ Dora) is addicted to Oxycontin, and although she is passive and in thrall to her addiction, she is not the airhead that Dora was. Mr Micawber in Dickens’ book was a larger-than-life, loveable perennial optimist: Mr and Mrs McCobb are grifters and schemers, just as reprehensible as Mr Creakle who fosters boys as a cheap labour source and in order to get their welfare payments. U-Haul does not have the same sinuous oiliness of Dickens’ original Uriah Heep, who made so much of his purported ‘umbleness – there is no 21st century equivalent of ‘humility’ as a virtue- and he seems to play a less important role in Kingsolver’s plot. Dickens is coy about Steerforth’s corruption of Emily: Kingsolver is upfront about the prostitution and sex trafficking into which Sterling Ford drags Emmy, Demon’s childhood friend.

In Dickens’ books, London and the large Victorian cities provide a backdrop to the plot. Kingsolver, who is from Appalachia herself, sets her book in the southern Appalachian mountains of Virginia. She knows these places (as did indeed Dickens know London and England), and both writers use their books as a critique of their own society. I did find myself thinking of Shuggie Bain or J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and there has been some critique of Demon Copperhead as being ‘poverty porn’. I didn’t see it that way. I was driven to finish the book, fearful that Kingsolver would do something very smart-alecky and postmodern to the ending. Did she? You’ll have to read it to find out.

This book garnered many prizes including the Pulitzer and the Women’s Prize for fiction. It well deserved them. It was a brilliant re-telling of David Copperfield, with many winks and nudges for those familiar with the original, and a perfectly independent story on its own terms.

My rating: 10/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle March selection.

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 April 2024

History Hit Ataturk: Fall of the Ottoman Empire As Australians, we mainly know Ataturk through the Gallipoli Campaign and the words that he is supposed to have said in burying the Australian war dead. But this episode concentrates instead of the fall of both the Ottoman and Habsburg empires at the end of WWI: falls that presaged very different outcomes as Vienna wasn’t occupied, but Turkey was. Ataturk was part of an educated cohort and he was militarily successful and politically active. At first he promoted Muslim Unity but this was largely a generational battle over the incompetence of the generals which led to the loss of Edirne and Thessalonika. Ataturk (or rather Mustafa Kemal) was a dictator, who looked to the Mufti of Istanbul, declaring 1919 as the start of Turkish history. In 1922 Parliament dissolved itself (and along with it the Ottoman dynasty) and in 1923 Turkey declared itself a republic and turned its back on other Muslim, especially the Kurds. They toppled the Greeks (leading Prince Phillip to leave Greece and come to England) and they undertook a ‘population exchange’ (which might more easily be seen as ‘ethnic cleansing’) Further reforms to the language and the script were part of the desire for Turkey to look like Spain, leading to a backlash in the Islamic world. He died in 1938. Current president Erdogan has undertaken several of his projects e.g. reconverting the Sofia Hagia from mosque to museum. I found this episode fascinating. There was so much more to Ataturk than I could have imagined.

Soul Search (ABC) In the spirit of Easter, I listened to Soul Search on Imagining Jesus on screen and in literature. Apparently the Pope had a recent meeting with film maker Martin Scorsese, who made ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ in 1988. The Pope spoke about imagination and Christ, and Scorsese seems to be on board, as are Terrence Mallick and Mel Gibson (groan). Features Dr Adrian Rosenfeldt , Lecturer and Head Tutor in Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University.

The Rest is History Continuing on with Titanic Ep 429 Titanic: Countdown to Disaster Part 3, Dominic and Tom look at the passengers who were in First and Second class. First class was not full- apparently Gilded Age Edwardians liked just not turning up, because they could. Even though the top First-Class cabin had been decked out specifically for J. Pierpoint Morgan, he cancelled his trip which has triggered all sorts of conspiracy theories that he was behind the sinking to get rid of his business rivals. In First Class there were many 3rd generation Jewish Americans, or as someone once waspishly commented “Steerage Twice Removed”. First Class had the first swimming pool, and it was appointed to a level commensurate with the Waldorf Astoria. There was a barrier between First Class and steerage, as shown in the Titanic movie, but this was demanded by US immigration for fear of disease. Second Class is often overlooked. It was a smaller group, comprising clergy, doctors etc. and a group of Cornish miners. It might have been Second Class on the Titanic, but on any other ship it would have been considered First Class.

Things Fell Apart Episode 6 A Hierarchy of Trauma. This podcast seems to be channelling my old-lady curmudgeonliness. Here Jon Ronson explores how ‘deplatforming’, which has been common on college campuses for some time, spread into newsrooms so that we all now need to avoid causing “emotional harm”. He looks at the identification of PTSD in the 1970s amongst Vietnam vets and the way that the language of trauma has broadened and now dominated personal interaction.

History Hit Lawrence of Arabia The older I get, the more I realize that I have snippets of random knowledge that I couldn’t put into a coherent narrative if I tried. The episode about Lawrence of Arabia is a case in point- all I know about is the film and that he died on a country lane. T. E. Lawrence was born in Wales in 1888 and his parents were not married: in fact, his mother had been a governess and his father ran away with her, and they adopted new names and identities. He studied history at Oxford, and in 1909 went on a walking tour of the Levant, looking at medieval castle- his particular interest. It was on this tour that he developed a dislike of the Ottoman Turkish authorities. In these pre-war years, the British used archaeologists as intelligence gatherers for any future British Empire activity in the area. When WWI broke out, it was not clear which side the Ottoman Empire would go on, or whether it would stay neutral, but they aligned themselves with the Germans and Austro-Hungarian Empire (how ironic). In 1916 there was an Arab uprising led by Sharif Hussein which seized Medina and Mecca, two crucially important cities in Islam. Lawrence advised the British to back the revolt and Faisal, one of Sharif’s sons, as the leader. Lawrence joined Faisal conducting raids on the Istanbul to Medina railway. He encouraged the Arabs to attack the port of Aquaba, which they took. Lawrence rode to the Suez Canal and from there to Cairo to pitch to General Allenby a plan for the Arab forces to act as a guerilla army. He received Allenby’s permission and British gold to pay them. It was only after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that he learned of the Sykes-Picot agreement which divided the Middle East up between the British and French, with no provision made for the Arabs. He was captured briefly by the Turkish forces, who raped and abused him, but let him go free. In 1918, British attention swung towards the Western Front, but then Allenby resumed battle in the Middle East. The Ottomans were defeated, and retreated. Lawrence oversaw a slaughter of 4000 Ottoman soldiers in revenge for a massacre the Turks had conducted at Tafas. He reached Damascus, the big prize, on 1 October 1918 and established a provincial government with Faisal at its head, but then learned that it was to be under French administration. Faisal did manage to establish a brief Arab Kingdom (and even met with Zionists, which could have led to a whole other history), but it was shortlived. In 1920 France invaded Syria, and there were revolts throughout the Middle East. In the meantime, Lawrence was becoming a household name, largely through the publicity efforts of American journalist Lowell Thomas- something that appalled Lawrence. He joined the RAF for a time, but by 1935 was living incognito in Dorset, where he had his motorbike accident. He died on 19 March 1935, aged 46.

‘David Copperfield’ by Charles Dickens : nearly 50 years on

1850, 1024 p.

One of my reading groups read Demon Copperhead in March. I knew that the writing of Demon Copperhead was influenced by Dickens’ book, and so I decided to re-read it. I seem to have read a succession of recent books that are written well-enough recently but I craved something a bit more complex and convoluted. When I thought about it, I read David Copperfield nearly 50 years ago at university and I thought that it could probably withstand a re-reading at that distance!

It certainly did, although it was a big ask. At 1024 pages in the Penguin edition (and over 2000 pages on my Kobo reader), it took me over 26 hours to read. But it has such a wide cast of characters who have found their way into literary culture that it rewards meeting them again in the original: Mister Micawber, always waiting for something to turn up, and the slimy Uriah Heep.

Fifty years later, I still find bubble-headed Dora and her stupid, snappy little dog Jip tedious and frustrating. Agnes is still too noble and angelic. If anything, Dickens’ depiction of women in this book has become even more problematic than it was back in the 1970s. The steely coldness of his step-father Mr Murdstone is ‘of a type’ more common back in Victorian times, but still conveys the sense of David’s security being stripped away bit by bit.

But what surprised me on this later reading is how much about colonial immigration – particularly to Australia- there is in the book. It’s almost like an advertising brochure for escaping your problems by heading off to the colonies. I hadn’t been quite so aware of Dickens’ social and legal commentary, either, when I read it 50 years ago. I think that I had more sympathy for David Copperfield’s creeping disillusionment with Dora and his marriage, and his dogged decision to keep on with the marriage, even though he was getting so little from it.

So worth 26 hours of my life? (In fact, if you consider that this is a second reading, that makes 52 hours of my life). Absolutely. As you will see, it enhanced my reading of Demon Copperhead immeasurably, and I’m grateful that, age and digital-attention-span notwithstanding, I can still tackle this big baggy monster of a book, and enjoy it thoroughly.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: e-book

Movie: Perfect Days

I go with my Unitarian group to the movies on the second Saturday of the month, and this was the perfect movie to see with them, given that we’ve been discussing ‘spiritual practice’ recently. Every day of Hirayama’s life is a spiritual practice, as soon as he opens his door and looks – really looks- at the sky. His job is very humble, cleaning public toilets, but he takes pride in his work. His life is very ritualistic and ordered, right from the sound of a woman sweeping the street outside, through to his lunchtime and taking one photo per day, through to his dinner at the same restaurant, and closing the day with reading on his tatami mat by the light of a single globe. A whole other, previous life is hinted at when his sister comes to collect her daughter but it is left unexplored. I had just seen Groundhog Day the Musical the week before, and there is certainly repetition of day after day in this as well. It’s certainly slow, and probably 15-20 minutes too long, but it’s made me think about finding meaning and beauty in the small things that I encounter each day. I enjoyed this a lot, and I’ve thought about it many times since.

My rating: 4/5 stars.

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 24-31 March 2024

Being Roman In the episode What We Lost in the Fire, Mary Beard tells of the physician, polymath and writer Galen’s loss of his papers and equipment in the Great Fire of Rome, when his lockup at the Spice Warehouse went up in flames. His first medical-type job was looking after the gladiators in Pergamon, which was a source of on-the-spot dissection and much learning about injuries, fat and muscle. He moved to Rome where he undertook public dissections and made a name for himself as physician to emperors. His autobiography ‘On Not Grieving’ was re-discovered in 2005, and despite the title, it shows that he really did grieve the loss of his writing for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, 10% of all the classical Greek writing that we have today was written by Galen.

The Rest is History Titanic: Kings of the World Part 2 Of course, the Titanic was made of stuff that sinks, part of a suite of liners called Olympic, Brittanic and then the rather hubristic Titanic. It was designed by Thomas Andrews, Pirie’s nephew. White Star was famous for luxury and safety, as distinct from Cunard, which concentrated on speed. It catered for enormous wealth, with the best quality berths costing 400,000 pounds at the peak of the season. (Did I hear that right?) But it also accommodated second and third class passengers in good conditions and it had the best safety features of any ship built until then. It had a double hull with 15 bulkheads, and although the number of lifeboats was insufficient, with a capacity of 1/3 of the passengers, it was compliant with standards at the time. After the standard 12 hours of sea trial, it left Belfast for Southhampton, which was the new port for London although it was still overwhelmingly manned by Liverpool shipworkers. However, in an ominous sign, the Captain had been involved in two accidents in the six months prior to the sinking of the Titanic.

Global Story BBC Curse of the World’s Fastest Growing Economy I don’t often hear news from Guyana, the location for part of my PhD’s topic John Walpole Willis’ colonial career. And I don’t often hear from Steven Sachur except as part of his rather verbally aggressive Hard Talk interview quiz on BBC. He has just returned from Guyana with its population of about 800,000 people where oil and gas were discovered 200 km off the coast in 2015. Exxon-Mobil are doing the drilling, and although some is going to government, it is still very profitable for the company. But is it a blessing or a curse? It has led to an increased security threat for the small nation, especially from its neighbour Venezuela which has mounted a large claim on Essequibo. Guyana is especially vulnerable to climate change, with heavy reliance on its sea walls and Dutch-built canals (from Judge Willis’ time). An off-shore spill would be disastrous for eco-tourism. Sackur spoke of his bruising (for him) interview with Guyana’s President Mohamed Irfaan Ali who made a strong argument for it being Guyana’s turn to reap benefits from its resources.

I Survived Las Vegas Shooting, then was convinced it was staged In 2017, Stuart McCormick survived the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in US history, while visiting Las Vegas. He was there, he saw it, and yet he came to believe that it was orchestrated by the US government. How could that be? The BBC’s disinformation correspondent, Marianna Spring, suggests that there is a conspiracy theory blueprint, that she saw at work in Stuart’s case. First, conspiracy theories build on a grain of truth, with legitimate fear and worry leading to anxiety. Second, conspiracy theories have their own vocabulary which is recognized by adherents. Third, people then start to wonder what else is staged? Fourth, people holding conspiracy theories become isolated, largely because of the shame and stigma that surrounds them. She notes that Finland includes a study of social media conspiracies in its curriculum, in the hope of fortifying students against them.

Emperors of Rome podcast Episode CVI The Third Servile War After escaping from gladiator school, Spartacus and his fellow escapees fled to Mt Vesuvius, which hadn’t erupted at this time, heading for Gaul and the Alps. Whatever Spartacus was, he wasn’t a freedom fighter, but on the other hand, his followers had increased from 70 to 70,000 men. It was decided to send in two consuls with two legions, and Spartacus defeated them both, taking 300 Roman soldiers and sacrificing them, striking further terror into the Romans.

Episode CVII The Legacy of Spartacus There was no mucking around now: the Senate sent in Crassus, who had had success during the civil war. He was a tough leader, who punished the whole army (not just a legion) with decimation after a defeat- a harsh and ultimately self-sabotaging action. Spartacus was now heading south with 120,000 fighters but got trapped in the toe of Italy. There was no final confrontation: he just kept fighting and his body was never found. It was a big victory for Crassus but he couldn’t claim a ‘triumph’ because he defeated an internal enemy. The film depiction of Spartacus being crucified is untrue (they never found his body), but there were 6000 crucifixions among his other troops. Spartacus has become a symbol of resistance for other generations, especially through the Spartacus movie, filmed during the 1960s in the midst of the civil rights campaign.

‘Lies My Mirror Told Me’ by Wendy Harmer

2023, 391 p.

I read this book because it was written by Wendy Harmer and because of the characteristic we have in common: cleft lip and palate.

You know, she’s the only woman with a cleft that I know of in public life. Cleft lip and palate is not that uncommon, affecting 1 in 800 births. If so, where do we all go? I know of a couple of male (but not female) actors, no politicians, no business people, no teachers, no doctors. People with clefts always recognize each other with a quick glance, close attention to the speech, a heartbeat of recognition, but nothing said.

But Wendy Harmer, as one of Australia’s most recognized comedians, is upfront about her cleft, having told her story on television and radio programs many times. In this book, she has the time and space to talk about it without her story being shaped by an interviewer’s questions, and to place it in context among the other varied aspects of her career, now that she, like me, is in her late sixties.

She uses the construct of the mirror as a way of organizing her book, with many chapters starting with a mirror in a different location and the self-talk that accompanies her looking at herself in the mirror. I think that most women in particular (men too?- I can’t speak for them) have a fraught relationship with a mirror: “I’m too fat”; “I have a pimple on the end of my nose”; that close scrutiny of yourself when applying make-up. I think that this ambivalence is probably stronger for people with clefts because you are seeing yourself and your difference from the outside, as others see you. That difference is always a little jolt. I can remember, even as an adult, being fascinated by the three-way mirrors in a triangular dressing room, seeing my asymmetrical profile in a reflection of a reflection, something that I had never seen before. For the child with a cleft, you have sat in a surgeon’s consulting room as your face is scrutinized as a medical problem to be solved; after surgery (once they let you have a mirror!) you stare at the stitches, wishing that somehow they are going to make your life different.

Harmer’s relationship with a mirror was particularly stark when, as a child she complained about teasing, her mother’s response was to say “I want you to go and stand in front of the mirror and when you can find something complain about, you come out here and tell me”. A risky bit of tough-love, I’d say, although Wendy came out saying “I’ve got nothing to be sorry for”. What Wendy only learned decades later was that after she said that, her mother “bawled and bawled my eyes out. Bless your little heart for saying that. I look back and think how harsh that was. I wish I could have been softer.” (p. 378) For in truth, there was something to complain about. Not just the cleft, but also a really difficult childhood, with frequent shifts between schools, an absent mother, a frequently-absent father, a vindictive stepmother and far, far too much responsibility as the eldest daughter.

I hadn’t realized just how varied Harmer’s career has been. She started off as a journalist, first with the Geelong Advertiser in the country, then working for The Sun in Melbourne during the 1970s. The Sun’s features editor sent her off to an ‘alternative comedy’ night at Melbourne University for an article. On stage were Steve Vizard, Paul Grabowsky, Gina Riley, Richard Stubbs and Los Trios Ringbarkus – all of whom ended up being stalwarts of Melbourne comedy/arts scene. She returned to the Sun office, wrote the article and declared that she was going to give up journalist for a crack at comedy.

Here the book becomes much more your standard ‘celebrity autobiography’. I recently saw an interview with comedian Wil Anderson and he spoke about how fundamental Wendy Harmer is to Australian comedy, and even more so women’s comedy, and it’s writ large in this long roll-call of people that she has worked with, both in Australia and overseas. I had only become aware of Harmer through ‘The Big Gig’ and ABC comedy shows from the days when the ABC poured money into locally produced comedy shows instead of a succession of panel discussions and quiz shows. But she has been around for decades, plying her craft in cabaret venues, on TV and in comedy festivals in Australia, Edinburgh and in the US. There’s always a risk that this descends into name-checking and cliché, and the book does suffer from this a bit- there are just so many names! There’s her shift to the bear-pit of Sydney breakfast radio; her many fairly-light novels, her children’s stories; her screen-writing; her ‘Is it just me?’ podcast with Angela Catterns which I mourned when it finished; the Hoopla website between 2011 and 2015. Along with the successes, there are failures as podcasts and websites close, radio breakfast teams churn on to the next iteration of the same formula, and the gig of hosting the Logies devours its next victim. Despite such a varied and full career, there is an element of regret and nostalgia near the end of the book as times change, the media environment becomes crasser and ‘women of a certain age’ become less bankable as media personalities. Her father has died; her relationship with her mother is wary; one sibling has died while another is estranged in the way of families. But Harmer herself is in a good place. As she says,

I search for so many people I loved dearly in the rear-view mirror. But the times I spent with my beloved companions can’t be found in any looking-glass. They are a smell, a touch, sounds and words which cannot be framed and hung on any wall. We see only our own faces when we look into a mirror.

p. 389

And the mirror has no lies to tell her anymore.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 March 2024

History Extra I recently saw the movie ‘Zone of Interest’ and so I was interested in the episode The Man who ran Auschwitz: the real story of the Zone of Interest, featuring acclaimed history of Nazi Germany Richard J. Evans. He had acted as historical consultant on Martin Amis’ novel on which the film is loosely based, and he approved of the film even though he felt that it smoothed out the sexual dysfunction in Hoss’ family. Hoss was born in 1901 and joined the German Army in WWI as a 14 year old. He was jailed during the Weimer Republic as a right wing fanatic, and once the Nazis achieved power, he became a member of the SS. Along with his colleagues, he believed that the Jews had to be eliminated as enemies of the Government. Auschwitz was originally a labour camp then expanded into an extermination camp- actually it was three separate camps. Hoss came up with the idea of gassing, and his career was seen as a success. He married young and his wife was a strong Nazi. After the war, many Nazis suicided or fled the country and took up false identities. It was the practice for arrested Nazis to be committed, tried and hanged in the country where the crimes were committed. He did admit his crimes (he had become a Catholic), which was unusual, and he was forced to write his memoirs prior to his execution. Evans says that you can’t expect films to be historically accurate and he was more critical of the films of the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Schindler’s List (the film) for their distortions.

Nichey History. I’m off to Phnom Penh again, so I thought I’d revisit some Cambodian history podcasts again. I thought that this podcast sounded pretty undergraduate, and it is- the presenter Jessa Briggs is currently an undergraduate studying English with creative writing, History and Global Studies. Listening to her murdering pronunciation of Cambodian names, and presenting in effect an overview of other people’s writing, this is not high-tech or particularly original work. But it was a good refresher for me. Episode 9. Cambodia’s Khmer Empire (aka the civilization that created Angkor Wat, et. al) starts by pointing out that the Khmer Empire was bigger than the Byzantine Empire, reaching its peak between the 11th and 13th centuries. In started in the 8th century, from the east, and reached its apogee with Jayavarman VIIth, their greatest king. Greatest because of his military prowess; his ability to unify Buddhist and Hindu believers and his building program, some of which still stands today. He was followed by Jayavarman VIIIth who followed the Hindu god Shiva, and who destroyed many Buddhist temples. In 1295 the new King took them back to Buddhism. All this back and forth was a big shift, and Kings were no longer deities. She is at pains to point out that the Khymer culture went into decline, but not collapse. Some theories for why: first, the shift from Buddhism to Hinduism and back again; second, foreign invasion especially from Thailand fuelled internal conflict, and third environmental factors. Angkor was a hydraulic city, and once the elites could no longer guarantee two rice harvests a year (and all the wealth that conferred), then they lost power. She suggests that it was a combination of all three factors.

Episode 10. Recovered from the Jungle: Angkor Wat (or the temple that is a city) takes up the story, looking at Angkor Wat itself. It was recovered from the jungle, and as the only Khmer temple that is oriented to the West it is suggested that it was a final resting place for Jayavarman’s ancestors, but there is no evidence for that. It contains 1200 kms of waterways, and water was necessary to make the ground strong enough to withstand all this building.

Global Story People Will Keep Dying: the spread of Fentanyl across the US/Mexican border Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin, and it kills 200 people a day in the US. However, although all the talk is of the effect in America, despite the President of Mexico’s denial, it’s affecting Mexico as well. Ironically a shortage of the ‘wake up’ drug Narcan in Mexico means that Narcan is being smuggled back across the border into Mexico! Drug cartels are behind it, and unlike cocaine or marijuana, it is a completely synthetic drug, so there’s no dependence on growers and crops. It’s portable and is even being smuggled in through tunnels. The cartels and the mafia have tentacles deep into the US.

Things Fell Apart Episode 5, Series 2 Things Weren’t Going Back to Normal starts off with the gay-hate crime Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016 then jumps ahead to 2020 in Tallahassee where the mother of a 13 year old girl was worried when her daughter told her that she didn’t feel like a girl. The mother, January Littlejohn, told the school that she would let her daughter take the lead on this. However, when she found that the school had written up a plan, aided by a group which emerged as a response to the Pulse Nightclub shooting four years earlier, she contacted Ron de Santis, who used her example as a rallying call for his ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law. Despite the moral panic, from 33,000 students, only 10 plans had been written, and the panic about young people identifying as cats i.e. ‘furries’ is unfounded. Yes, there are buckets of kitty litter in classrooms, but that’s in case the students are locked in because a school shooter is on the loose. Fix that up, de Santis.

The Rest is History Episode 1 The Tragedy Begins. Dominic and Tom are embarking on a series on the Titanic which they claim encapsulates bigger themes than just a movie. The sinking of the Titanic is now seen as a metaphor for the coming of the War. They concentrate in this first episode on three men: J.P. Morgan the ‘King of the Trusts’ (whose uncle wrote Jingle Bells no less). Morgan formed a conglomerate with the White Star line, emphasizing speed. The second man is Thomas Ismay, a rough hewn entrepreneur who made money shipping goldseekers to the Australian goldfields, and who owned the parent company. The third man is William Pirrie, who worked his way up at Harland and Wolfe in Belfast, who had dreams of being a politician, but was a supporter of Home Rule. At the end of the Gilded Age, there is competition between US and UK, now joined by Germany, and an emphasis on speed, luxury and modernity.

Six Degrees of Separation: from ‘A Dragon Apparent’ to ‘The Dismissal Dossier’

I am appalled that it is April already, and as it’s the first Saturday it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation Day. This meme, hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest involves starting off with one title, then linking six other books as they spring to mind. Kate usually chooses the starting book, but this month we were invited to start with “a travel book”.

Well, as it turns out, I have just this week returned from travel, having visited my son and his family in Cambodia. This has been my second trip there, and I enjoyed reading Norman Lewis’ book A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (my review here). It was written in 1951 and in parts is racist and stereotyping. So why would I want to read it? Mainly for its descriptions of landscape, the feeling of menace as he aligns himself with the French in an increasingly hostile environment, and the elegiac nostalgia for a lost time and lost culture, given all that was about to happen to these three countries in the following thirty years.

Graham Greene once said that Norman Lewis “is one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century”. High praise indeed. It is said that Lewis’ book inspired Greene to travel to Vietnam to write The Quiet American which I read before I started blogging. Both books share a reserved, observational tone.

The Quiet American in Greene’s book was Alden Pyle, a CIA agent, posted to Vietnam during the Cold War. Here in Australia we had our own secret agents and Cold War conspiracies, and these are fictionalized in Andrew Croome’s Document Z (my review here).

The unfictionalized version is explored in Robert Manne’s The Petrov Affair (again, read before I started blogging). I can’t imagine that anyone could add any more to Manne’s account.

The Petrov Affair fed right into Robert Menzies’ unexpected victory over the Labor Party at the 1954 election. Judith Brett’s Menzies’ Forgotten People describes Menzies’ capture of the ‘middling type’ in Australia through his radio broadcasts and projection of a fatherly-type of Prime Minister that John Howard worked hard to emulate. I would hope that we’ve grown up enough not to need Daddy anymore.

‘Doc’ Evatt was leader of the Opposition Labor Party in 1954, and he appeared as attorney for his staff members when the Petrov Affair culminated in the Royal Commission on Espionage . Gideon Haigh’s The Brilliant Boy explores Evatt’s career as historian, attorney, politician, Chief Justice and President of the UN General Assembly (my review here).

A later Governor-General who immersed himself in Evatt’s historical writing was Sir John Kerr, whose career has been criticized strongly by Jenny Hocking in The Dismissal Dossier (my review here). Hocking has been pursuing the correspondence between Kerr and the Palace for many years – the historian as heroine!

I seem to have immersed myself in politics here, which seems an odd tangent from a travel book!

‘A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam’ by Norman Lewis

1951 , 336 p/

Any travel book written in 1951 will have aged, and this book is no exception. Indeed, the author Norman Lewis was well-aware that he was writing in the midst of history, noting in his preface that the stalemate in Indo-China had broken after four years, and that as the proofs of his book were being corrected in January 1951, the Viet-Minh were closing in on Hanoi.

It seems certain that before the book appears further important changes will have taken place.

He wasn’t wrong. One of the poignancies of this book is our knowledge, seventy years on, that the world he describes here was about to be obliterated. In the preface to the 1982 version of his book, Lewis writes:

…the greatest holocaust ever to be visited on the East…consumed not only the present, but the past; an obliteration of cultures and values as much as physical things. From the ashes that remained no phoenix would ever rise. Not enough survive even to recreate the memory of what the world had lost.

1982 preface

This meandering book is the story of Lewis’ travels through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. By 1951, France had offered independence to its former colonies, but although nominally independent, France still controlled foreign policy, and the French army was stationed throughout. Lewis was not there under the aegis of any press company, and after consulting with the French authorities, he was reliant on their goodwill to enable him to hitch rides under French protection across the three countries. The French Army at the time was at war with the Viet Minh, and so his whole narrative is permeated by a sense of oppression and coercion.

As a British writer, he has internalized much of the colonizers’ racism that sees people as a certain ‘type’. He spends considerable time with different tribes, the Mois, the Meos and the Rhades,distinguishing them from other tribal groups, and there is an elegiac sense that these groups will not survive. He is particularly critical of missionaries and their blithe confidence that they are doing good, and he castigates the planters and their cosy relationship with the French occupiers.

He is reliant on the army to get him from one place to another and he speaks only French and English. There is a lot of waiting around, angling for his next ride. As a result, he interacts mainly with French administrators and residents and those local officials that the French government have been willing to leave in place. He gains access to high places, but always with the permission and imprimatur of the French colonizers. It was almost with surprise that he found a young Cambodian boy who could speak “passable” French, which enabled him to understand more of a local dance performance than he would otherwise. It was only in the last chapter that he gains access to the Viet Minh, through the agency of Dinh, who he met in a doctor’s waiting room. Here he witnesses the influence of China and the Soviet Union in supporting the independence struggle against the French.

It is very much a book of its time in its Eurocentric classifications and descriptions of people and groups. For example, here’s his description of Dinh, his contact with the Viet Minh:

He introduced himself as Dinh- an assumed name, he assured me with a wry smile. I was interested to notice, in support of a theory I was beginning to form, that for a Vietnamese he was very ‘unmongolian’ in appearnce. He was thin-lipped and cadaverous and there was an unusual narrowness across the cheekbones. If not a Frenchman he could certainly have passed for a Slav. There had been many Caucasian characteristics about the other Vietnamese intellectually and revolutionaries I had met, and I was wondering whether whatever physical mutation it was that produced this decrease in mongolian peculiarities encouraged at the same time the emergence of certain well-known Western traits, such as a restless aggressiveness, an impatience with mere contemplation, and a taste for action.

Ch. 20

So what was the appeal for me in reading this racist, 70 year old text? For me, it was his descriptions of landscape. Take, for example, his description of Ta Phrom temple in Siem Reap:

Ta Prohm is an arrested cataclysm. In its invasion, the forest has not broken through it, but poured over the top, and the many courtyards have become cavities and holes in the forest’s false bottom. In places the cloisters are quite dark, where the windows have been covered with subsidences of earth, humus and trees. Otherwise they are illuminated with an aquarium light, filtered through screens of roots and green lianas.

Entering the courtyards, one comes into a new kind of vegetable world; not the one of branches and leaves with which one is familiar, but that of roots. Ta Prohm is an exhibition of the mysterious subterranean life of plants, of which it offers an infinite variety of cross-sections. Huge trees have seeded themselves on the roots of the squat towers and their soaring trunks are obscured from sight; but here one can study in comfort the drama of those secret and conspiratorial activities that labour to support their titanic growth.

Down, then, come the roots, pale, swelling and muscular. There is a grossness in the sight; a recollection of sagging ropes of lava, a parody of the bulging limbs of circus freaks, shamefully revealed. The approach is exploratory. The roots follow the outlines of the masonry; duplicating pilasters and pillars; never seeking to bridge a gap and always preserving a smooth living contact with the stone surfaces; burlesquing in their ropy bulk the architectural [motifs] which they cover. It is only long after the hold has been secured that the deadly wrestling bout begins. As the roots swell their grip contracts. Whole blocks of masonry are torn out, and brandished in mid-air. A section of wall is cracked, disjoint/ed and held in suspension like a gibbeted corpse; prevented by the roots’ embrace from disintegration. There are roots which appear suddenly, bursting through the flagstones to wander twenty yards like huge boa constrictors, before plunging through the upended stones to earth again.

Ch. 15

Absolutely brilliant writing. I found myself rethinking my perceptions -“grossness”- yes, that was the unease that I felt while I was there. Even though many of the villages and landscapes he describes may have disappeared, there is enough remaining that you think “Ah, yes, that’s how it was!” Although I’m not a great aficionado of travel narratives, I think that this is what good travel writing does best: it puts on paper something that you felt, or detected, and it captures it, just right, in words that you wish you thought of yourself.

My rating: 8/10 (taking it on its own terms)

Read because: I was travelling in Cambodia.

‘On Doubt’ by Leigh Sales

2020, 128 p

If nothing else, having to prepare talks for my Unitarian fellowship makes me read things I might not have read otherwise. On Doubt, by journalist Leigh Sales is part of the ‘On…’ series published by Hachette, and like the other books in the series, it is only short: in this case only 128 pages.

As a journalist, Sales has had plenty of experience with politicians who come onto her program, pumped up full of talking points and bombast. Her exploration of ‘doubt’ is largely through a political lens, but in Part I she starts by talking personally about her own curiosity and rebelliousness as a child. She rarely accepted anything as a given, and although converting to evangelical Christianity as a teenager, she soon rejected the ‘truths’ of religion that had to be accepted on faith, as well.

In Part 2 she turns to politics, struck by the certainty of Sarah Palin who boasted that she “didn’t blink” when asked to be George W. Bush’s vice president, despite her complete lack of experience. She notes that much of our media today is comprised of commentary rather than research or reporting, marked by point-scoring and moral certitude. This is most manifest in the US television that we receive here in Australia but she reports a similar unedifying spectacle between Gerard Henderson from the Sydney Institute and Robert Manne, who often writes for the Schwartz stable of publications. In the part of the book that was most useful to me, she quotes Pierre Abelard from the 11th century who wrote that the path to truth lies in the systematic application of doubt, and that those who have sought the truth begin from a premise of doubt, not certainty.

However, the expression of self-doubt is not seen as a virtue in politics. She was stunned when former Treasurer Wayne Swan revealed that he (and he assumed, most other people) had times of self-doubt. She compares this with George W. Bush who relied on his gut-feelings, bolstered by his religious faith, to the extent that even the people who surrounded him became uneasy. She talks about gut-feeling, citing Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink which asserts that people who are expert in their field (and that’s probably a very important qualification) use ‘thin slicing’ to instantly identify patterns in current situations, enabling them to make decision in the blink of an eye. But she also recognizes ‘the yips’ that assail someone who is very competent when they start to overthink something that they are already expert in- like playing the piano (for her maybe! Oh, to be good enough to get the yips!)

In Part IV she talk about people like her father, who leave nothing to chance, citing his mantra “Preparation and planning prevent piss-poor performance”. While bridling against the certainty and inflexibility that this approach guarantees, she observes that her own “what if” thinking, shot through with doubt, can lead to anxiety and a lack of all-consuming passion.

She finishes off in Part V with a post-script written in 2017, eight years after the original book. In those eight years, she suggests, we have become accustomed to distortion through social media, and we accept with equanimity the shrugs of corporate bosses and the misrepresentations of politicians. While refusing to divulge her own political leanings, she decries the idea of ‘balance’ which gives equal time to both sides.

As you can see, this book is a bit of a grab-bag of observations, not all of which are closely tied to the theme of ‘doubt’. It could almost do with another post-script, given the rise of deep fakes and AI which frighten me for the way that they undercut even what we have seen (or think we have seen). However, it’s an easy enough read- not unlike a long-form article that remains at a largely surface level and with its main interest in the political realm.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: borrowed e-book from Yarra Plenty Regional Library.