Friday, November 20, 2015

Review by Peter Craven

Review in Spectrum of My Hearts Are Your Hearts and Fair Game.

Written by Peter Craven
22November 2015





Stories and memoir
My Hearts Are Your Hearts
CARMEL BIRD
SPINELESS WONDERS, $27.99
Fair Game: A Tasmanian Memoir
CARMEL BIRD
FINLAY LLOYD, $10


Fair Game by Carmel Bird.
Carmel Bird is a literary artist to her fingertips. She is a writer who believes – and they are rarer than they should be – in composition in the musical phrase. She is a maker of fiction in the tradition of Joyce and  of his master Flaubert who writes prose that has the precision of poetry and that uncanny quality poetry has of making the inner life speak. That is because she knows how to make it sound. For Bird, as for Ezra Pound, the emotion is in the cadence and so is the high and mighty moral vindication of art. 


These two books – one miniature, the other medium length – contain most of what we know and need to know about the telling and shaping of stories. Fair Game is a long essay about butterflies and Tasmania, where Bird hails from and which her fiction circles and returns to. In it her voice apparently weaves the wind but with touches of a different order of bewitchment. For all its conversational air, there is a swooping audacity in it.   
And so it is for the marvellous stories in My Hearts Are Your Hearts, which defy paraphrase because their musicality is so integral and so intricate yet they consistently stun the mind and touch the heart. 
We get an old English mistress in Her Voice Was Full of Money and They Were Careless People – how's that for the title of a story that would enchant – discoursing from the shallow well we imagine of her experience about the phenomenon of the hit and run driver. Literary education alerts us to something about Gatsby and, OK, Daisy, Tom Buchanan and his girlfriend. 
Before we know where we are, we are off – fleetingly, dazzlingly – on a kind of re-enactment and revision, the young, the beautiful. The death and the dazzle and events – that essence of the plotline – in a story that staggers the mind. 
Just before we get the story of two sisters, one who dies terribly in defiance of all moral convention, and the other who cannot tell the terrible truth of what has occurred. The Legacy of Rita Marquand is a story is full of incidental Catholic charity and whatever its quality of mercy was and yet it is full of the marbled coldness of a lost world that is well lost though Bird's art gives it a marvellous remembrance. 
Her stories have a grace and an inevitability that make you want to retell them or allude to them because they waste nothing. They  are as light as air, as rapid as anecdote, but with an extraordinary grace of music. In one way they are like those Borgesian equations of storytelling that seem to contain multitudes and sagas yet leave nothing but the outline. In Bird's case the economy seems so exactly paced that we believe in the absolute reality, at once mundane and musical, in a world that is exactly adjusted to the grain of the storyteller's voice. Nor does she have Borges' particular penchant for fiction as the algebraic reduction of a yarn that is told. 
My Beloved Is Mine and I Am His is the longest story in this book at 26 pages. In a shorter one, Perhaps That Bird Was Wise, a girl sits at her mother's deathbed, there is a watch of fool's gold that goes tick tock and time is fast. In T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets the bird says humankind cannot bear very much reality. The mother says everything happens to everyone. She likes the story of the chairs of the seven dwarfs but what does happily ever after mean? Later, after the mother dies, Allegra, the heroine, finds those chairs in a country antique shop. The little watch tick tocks on. Happily ever after. The bird was right.
Carmel Bird reduces the critic to repeating notes taken as he tries to hold onto these fugitive breathtaking stories. Read them. Read them aloud. They have the ring of truth. 






My Hearts Are Your Hearts, by Carmel Bird.

Stories and memoir
My Hearts Are Your Hearts
CARMEL BIRD
SPINELESS WONDERS, $27.99
Fair Game: A Tasmanian Memoir
CARMEL BIRD
FINLAY LLOYD, $10

Fair Game by Carmel Bird.
Carmel Bird is a literary artist to her fingertips. She is a writer who believes – and they are rarer than they should be – in composition in the musical phrase. She is a maker of fiction in the tradition of Joyce and  of his master Flaubert who writes prose that has the precision of poetry and that uncanny quality poetry has of making the inner life speak. That is because she knows how to make it sound. For Bird, as for Ezra Pound, the emotion is in the cadence and so is the high and mighty moral vindication of art. 
Advertisement

These two books – one miniature, the other medium length – contain most of what we know and need to know about the telling and shaping of stories. Fair Game is a long essay about butterflies and Tasmania, where Bird hails from and which her fiction circles and returns to. In it her voice apparently weaves the wind but with touches of a different order of bewitchment. For all its conversational air, there is a swooping audacity in it.   
And so it is for the marvellous stories in My Hearts Are Your Hearts, which defy paraphrase because their musicality is so integral and so intricate yet they consistently stun the mind and touch the heart. 
We get an old English mistress in Her Voice Was Full of Money and They Were – how's that for the title of a story that would enchant – discoursing from the shallow well we imagine of her experience about the phenomenon of the hit and run driver. Literary education alerts us to something about Gatsby and, OK, Daisy, Tom Buchanan and his girlfriend. 
Before we know where we are, we are off – fleetingly, dazzlingly – on a kind of re-enactment and revision, the young, the beautiful. The death and the dazzle and events – that essence of the plotline – in a story that staggers the mind. 
Just before we get the story of two sisters, one who dies terribly in defiance of all moral convention, and the other who cannot tell the terrible truth of what has occurred. The Legacy of Rita Marquand is a story is full of incidental Catholic charity and whatever its quality of mercy was and yet it is full of the marbled coldness of a lost world that is well lost though Bird's art gives it a marvellous remembrance. 
Her stories have a grace and an inevitability that make you want to retell them or allude to them because they waste nothing. They  are as light as air, as rapid as anecdote, but with an extraordinary grace of music. In one way they are like those Borgesian equations of storytelling that seem to contain multitudes and sagas yet leave nothing but the outline. In Bird's case the economy seems so exactly paced that we believe in the absolute reality, at once mundane and musical, in a world that is exactly adjusted to the grain of the storyteller's voice. Nor does she have Borges' particular penchant for fiction as the algebraic reduction of a yarn that is told. 
My Beloved Is Mine and I Am His is the longest story in this book at 26 pages. In a shorter one, Perhaps That Bird Was Wise, a girl sits at her mother's deathbed, there is a watch of fool's gold that goes tick tock and time is fast. In T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets the bird says humankind cannot bear very much reality. The mother says everything happens to everyone. She likes the story of the chairs of the seven dwarfs but what does happily ever after mean? Later, after the mother dies, Allegra, the heroine, finds those chairs in a country antique shop. The little watch tick tocks on. Happily ever after. The bird was right.
Carmel Bird reduces the critic to repeating notes taken as he tries to hold onto these fugitive breathtaking stories. Read them. Read them aloud. They have the ring of truth. 



No comments:

Post a Comment